BEFORE: Obviously, Samuel L. Jackson carries over again from "Hard Eight" - I've just moved forward from one of his earliest films to one of his latest - a 27-year jump. I had so many SLJ movies to work with here that i was able to put them in whatever order I wanted - and that made it a little easier to find another Birthday SHOUT-out, so we're sending one out today to actress Olivia Washington, born on April 10, 1991. One of Denzel's "nepo babies", also twin sister to this film's director and a fellow alumnae of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (though years after I went there).
This movie played a few times at the theater where I work, during guild screening season in November/December. It ended up getting zero Oscar nominations, but I'm not sure how it did in the PGA, WGA or SAG awards.
THE PLOT: Follows the lives of the Charles family as they deal with themes of family legacy and more, in deciding what to do with an heirloom, the family piano.
AFTER: I found this film to be very confusing, the story is all over the place - it fires off in every direction inconsistently. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the original play or just the movie. The play won a Pulitzer, but was it this disjointed, or is that a recent problem resulting from adapting it to film form? Did something get lost in the translation here?
I just went and read the plot description on Wikipedia - for the PLAY. Somehow that description finally brought things together for me, and so I suspect that the play somehow makes more sense than the movie does. How is that possible? The movie's script just made the characters talk in circles, often they would say the same things over and over again, which made everything seem kind of pointless and nonsensical. LIke, come on, she's NOT going to let you sell the family piano and let you buy land with the money, haven't we made that point clear already? Several times?
There were also a lot of family characters, past & present, that got introduced, without telling us what made any of them special or different. So while I acknowledge that this is a family that is proud of their heritage, to the audience it's just a list of names with no real meaning...and how am I supposed to distinguish one Berniece from the other, as there seem to be several of them in the same family? Plus there's a Willie Boy in the present and a Boy Willie in the past, that's not confusing to anyone else? What the heck was August Wilson thinking?
We hardly even get to hear anyone play the piano in question - Willie Boy plays a little boogie-woogie for 30 seconds and then there's a notable bit at the end when Berniece starts teaching Maretha, FINALLY. I was beginning to think that the title was a misnomer, or perhaps referred to a lesson ABOUT pianos, like maybe don't steal a piano because you'll end up putting a curse on it, or something like that.
What I could understand was that Willie Boy and Lymon drove up from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons, hoping to sell them in Pittsburgh, where some family members live. It seems to be a good business plan, except for the fact that the brakes on the truck sometimes don't work, and if the truck crashes, well those watermelons aren't likely to survive a crash. For that matter, how many days does it take to drive from Mississippi to Pittsburgh? And it's just an open truck, with no referigeration - how long does it take watermelons to go bad? I have no idea. They do manage to sell all of the watermelons to hungry Pittsburgh people, once they explain how to put salt on them - is that even a thing? And OK, they make some money selling the melons at 2 for a dollar - but then Lymon goes and spends most of his take on a silk suit and some shoes that don't fit so he can go to clubs and attract a woman. You know what would be a better business model? Figuring out what they can spend that money on in Pittsburgh that they could sell to people back in Mississippi, then they wouldn't have to drive back with an empty truck, assuming the truck is in good enough shape to drive back at all.
The news from Mississippi is that James Sutter fell down a well - the Sutter family used to own slaves, including the ancestors of this whole Charles family. So sister Berniece naturally assumes that Willie Boy pushed James Sutter down the well, but they keep saying that people down there get pushed down wells by the ghost of the Yellow Dogs, whatever that is. Or do people just say that to cover up the fact that alive black people push white people down wells? So much of this is unclear, and I don't think we ever get an answer.
We do learn, eventually, that the piano in the Charles residence was stolen from the Sutter family years ago, but it was carved by one of their ancestors and depicts key moments from their family history. A member of the Sutter family broke up a slave family to raise enough money to pay for the piano, which he bought for his wife as an anniversary present. Even though the carvings were made by a slave, which means that the law dictated that the carvings belong to the slave-owner, the Charles family felt that they had a right to the piano, so they stole it during a July 4 fireworks show. Boy Willie's father, who stole the piano, was tracked down and killed while trying to escape by train, by burning the whole boxcar he was trapped in.
So for this reason, Berniece won't sell the piano and give Willie Boy the money from its sale, and in fact she still holds a grudge because Willie Boy and Lymon were involved in stealing some wood that they were delivering, and this crime somehow led to the death of Berniece's husband, Crawley. It's another part of the family's back story that also doesn't get explained to the viewer very well, unfortunately.
And in the midst of all this, Berniece starts seeing a strange figure in their house, and claims it's the ghost of the recently departed James Sutter. Her daughter Maretha sees the ghost, too, and so they try to perform and exorcism with the help of Avery, a local preacher who also has offered to marry Berniece, but she won't consider it until he has his own church, for some reason. As the ghost manifests itself and starts attacking Willie Boy, Berniece tries to call upon her ancestors for help, which involves playing the same note repeatedly on the piano and calling out their names. Sure, why not, I guess that's worth a try?
I really don't understand the narrative, it just seems to contain a bunch of random events and complicated back-stories, but the end result is that the piano is part of the family history, and they need to keep it handy because it can keep ghosts from attacking the house? So Willie Boy does NOT get the extra money he was hoping for in order to buy the Sutter's farm land back home in Mississippi. Oh, if only he could have brought back something from Pittsburgh in the truck to sell... Steel? Ketchup?
Directed by Malcolm Washington
Also starring John David Washington (last seen in "The Creator"), Danielle Deadwyler (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Ray Fisher (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Corey Hawkins (last seen in "In the Heights"), Michael Potts (last seen in "Rustin"), Skylar Aleece Smith, Stephan James (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Erykah Badu (last seen in "House of D"), Malik J. Ali, Charity Jordan (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Isaiah Gunn, Matrell Smith, Jerrika Hinton, Gail Bean, Eilan Joseph, Pauletta Washington (last seen in "Beloved"), Olivia Washington (last seen in "The Little Things")), Kylee D. Allen, Deetta West, Jay Peterson, David Atkinson (last seen in "All I Wish"), Tony Fox, Melanie Jeffcoat (4/9), Owen Harn (last seen in "Night School"), Charles Green (last seen in "Freaky"), Lovell Gates,
RATING: 4 out of 10 fireworks in the flashback at the start of the film (it's all downhill from there, somehow...)
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