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Every payday, garbage collector Troy Maxson ( Denzel Washington ) holds court in the backyard of the Pittsburgh home he shares with his wife, Rose ( Viola Davis ) and their son, Cory ( Jovan Adepo ). By Troy’s side are his two best friends, Bono (Stephen Henderson), the co-worker he’s known for decades, and a bottle of gin, which Troy has also known for decades. Both are very good listeners, and there’s nothing Troy enjoys more than a captive audience. When his tales spin too wildly into fiction—at one point, Troy reminisces about wrestling with Death itself—Rose steps outside to playfully call him on his nonsense. Troy cuddles with her, tossing the raunchiest dialogue he has to offer in her direction. As the evening progresses, Troy is sometimes joined by his eldest son, Lyons ( Russell Hornsby ), who borrows money, or his disabled war veteran brother, Gabe ( Mykelti Williamson ), who has just moved from Troy’s home in a defiant display of his independence. Life is a series of routines culminating in death. Every payday brings Troy Maxson closer to his wrestling partner.

This repeated scenario forms the basis of August Wilson ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Fences.” 29 years after its Broadway premiere, “Fences” arrives in theaters courtesy of a screenplay by the late playwright himself. With two Pulitzer Prizes and his ten-play magnum opus, “The Pittsburgh Cycle,” (of which “Fences” is the sixth work), Wilson takes his rightful place alongside Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams as one of the greatest American playwrights. The focus of Wilson’s cycle is African-American life across the entire 20th century, with each play taking place in a particular decade. “Fences” is set in the 1950’s, but the timeframe does not date the material. Its universal themes supersede any of its societal details, though based on this year’s election cycle, viewers may be stunned to discover that the American working class is more than just Midwestern and White.

Wilson’s plays are rich, poetic, wordy affairs tinged with music, the magical nature of myth, and symbolic elements that work extremely well as live theater. Since theater is an intimate medium, the general consensus on translating plays to screen is to “open up” the play, which quite often destroys the natural fabric of the work. The masterful thing about Denzel Washington’s direction here is that he doesn’t exactly open up the play. Instead, he opens up the visual frame around the players. He and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen use the entire screen to occasionally dwarf the characters inside the backyard setting where much of the film takes place. At other times, tight framing gives an air of claustrophobia that’s almost suffocating. Throughout, there’s clear evidence that careful thought has been put into the quiet visual architecture of this film; there are several visual motifs that support the themes in Wilson’s words, and not once does a character seem to be in the wrong spot. For example, a scene between Bono and Troy, where Bono warns Troy of impending ruination, places the actors in the bottom right of the frame while rubble and an empty field symbolically take up most of the screen.

Most importantly, Washington as director knows that the biggest star in this film is its writing. When a film has actors this committed to speaking their lines, to the point where it seems they are turning themselves inside out with anguish, the camera is always exactly where it needs to be—it is  with them , listening as intently as we in the audience are. This type of direction is a lost art nowadays, evoking a prior time when masters like Billy Wilder and Sidney Lumet plied their trades. In fact, it was Wilder who eschewed the notion that ostentatious, flashy direction was what made for great drama, saying that if “something were said to be well-directed, that is proof that it is not.” Washington understands this, and “Fences” is much more powerful for his devotion to his actors’ craft. When Viola Davis is showing you how hard her heart is breaking, the camera doesn’t need to be competing for your attention.

“Fences” imports most of the cast of its Tony-winning 2010 revival (which I have seen). In addition to Washington and Davis, who won Tonys for lead acting, Henderson, Hornby and Williamson also reprise their roles. Their familiarity with the characters translates into a slew of excellent performances. Williamson has the trickiest role: his war-damaged Gabriel is the play’s most theatric and symbolic character. A man with a metal plate in his head, whose government disability check allowed Troy to buy his house, Gabriel thinks he’s the messenger of God described as a trumpet player in many Negro spirituals. Williamson humanizes this character by playing his delusions without mockery. He believes in his convictions, and as the last scene of the film indicates, he might not be wrong.

Wilson’s common theme of legacy fuels “Fences” in the guise of Troy’s relationship with Cory. Cory has the opportunity to get a college scholarship for his football skills, but Troy is against this primarily because of his own failed sports dreams. Troy was a great baseball player in the Negro Leagues, but this was well before Jackie Robinson (whom Troy despises), so Troy never realized his dreams of major league glory. It’s not lost on us that Troy is denied success in what is commonly called “America’s Pastime”; baseball serves as the perfect metaphor for the American Dream. Like the America of Troy’s time, it was segregated and demanded that Blacks knew their place. For most fathers, knowing their son wishes to follow in his footsteps would be a happy occasion, especially in sports and even more so if one’s legacy might be extended or surpassed. Yet Troy’s brutal pig-headedness drives an irredeemable wedge between the two. In his big confrontation scene, newcomer Adepo goes toe-to-toe with his scene-stealing director and almost upstages him.

As Troy, Washington has a role tailor-made for all his “Denzel”-isms. Whereas Troy’s brilliant originator, James Earl Jones , kept an open vein of terror flowing through his performance, Washington smothers his dark side with a charm that’s as sticky as flypaper. He makes it easy to see why Rose would fall for him—and stay with him besides the obvious reason that society demanded a woman have a husband. “Fences” gives Troy mountains of dialogue to climb, and the fast-talking Washington leaps over it, catering it to his familiar manner of speaking. Troy’s use of the N-word is particularly of interest. That Troy would say the word is not surprising for the timeframe, but Washington spins it differently depending on the recipient. With Bono, it’s a term of endearment, which Bono returns just as easily. But in the famous speech that takes up Act 1, Scene 3, when Troy levels it at Cory (“N--ger, as long as you in my house, you put a 'Sir' on the end of it when you talk to me"), he hurls it with the fury of a klansman.

Not to be outdone, Viola Davis brings her own arsenal of tricks. Nobody cries onscreen like Davis, and if that clip in the trailer affected you, you should be advised that the actual scene is a lot longer and even more devastating. It’s so painful, it’s almost unwatchable. In fact, anyone who had a strict taskmaster as a parent will find parts of “Fences” unendurable. But Davis’ Rose is the film’s barometer, measuring how much we can put up with Troy. She loves him, and she does much to soften his rough edges even when she’s pointing out how wrong he is. But once he breaks his contract with her, all bets are off. Troy may be meaner, but a nuclear warhead couldn’t melt the ice covering Davis’ delivery of the line “you a womanless man” to Troy.

“Fences” is a film about how our environment shapes us, and how, no matter how noble their intentions, our parents can’t help but mess us up in some fashion, just as their parents had done for them. This is our legacy as humans. Either we indoctrinate ourselves against that which we saw as wrong with our parents, or we catch their disease and we pass it on. Washington’s visual repetition of crosses throughout the film, either on the wall or in the chain Rose wears around her neck, is a reminder of the greatest father-son story ever told. This notion is in the script too: perhaps the most brutally honest thing Rose tells Cory near the film’s end is that he’s just like Troy. Especially after Cory’s speech about how he tried so hard to remove Troy’s terrifying influence from his soul. Cory’s acceptance of this truth, represented in his co-opting of the song Troy used to sing, is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Whether we want it or not, this is our legacy.

Odie Henderson

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Film credits.

Fences movie poster

Fences (2016)

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, language and some suggestive references.

138 minutes

Denzel Washington as Troy

Viola Davis as Rose

Stephen McKinley Henderson as Jim Bono

Jovan Adepo as Cory

Russell Hornsby as Lyons

Mykelti Williamson as Gabriel

Saniyya Sidney as Raynell

  • Denzel Washington
  • August Wilson

Writer (based upon his play)

Cinematographer.

  • Charlotte Bruus Christensen
  • Hughes Winborne
  • Marcelo Zarvos

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Review: Beneath the Bombast, ‘Fences’ Has an Aching Poetry

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fences movie review essay

By A.O. Scott

  • Dec. 15, 2016

By the end of “Fences,” we will have learned a lot about Troy Maxson — about his hard Southern childhood, his time in prison and the Negro Leagues, his work ethic, his sexual appetites and his parenting philosophy — but the first and most important thing we know about the man is that he is one of the world’s great talkers. He enters the screen on a tide of verbiage, jawing with his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and bantering with his wife, Rose (Viola Davis). The audience quickly grasps what Rose and Bono have known for years. Troy is by turns funny, provocative, inspiring and hurtful, but one thing he will never be as long as he draws breath is silent.

There is plenty of brag and bluster in his speech, as well as flecks of profanity and poetry. He tells tales and busts chops with unflagging energy, at times testing the patience of Rose, Bono and his other friends and relations. But mostly Troy, who makes no secret of his illiteracy, uses language as a tool of analysis, a way of explaining what’s on his mind and figuring out the shape of the world he must inhabit.

Movie Review: ‘Fences'

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “fences.”.

In the screen adaption of the August Wilson play “Fences,” Denzel Washington is a former Negro Leagues ballplayer whose bitterness over constricted opportunities poisons his family as well. In his review A.O. Scott writes: “Fences” is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play. The action ventures beyond the main character’s yard — into their house and onto the street, mostly —to give them a bit more room to move and the audience a little more to look at. Confinement, however, is a theme implied in the play’s title, and opening it up too much would risk diluting the power of watching large personalities colliding in a narrow place. If the sound were to suddenly fail — or if the dialogue were dubbed into Martian — the impact of the performances would still be palpable.

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Language is also, in another sense, Troy’s very substance. He came into being as words on the page, words assembled and given life by the playwright August Wilson. Embodied onstage first by James Earl Jones in the original 1985 production of “Fences” and more recently by Denzel Washington in the 2010 Broadway revival, Troy is one of the indelible characters in American dramatic literature, equal to — and in some ways a pointed response to — Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.

Mr. Washington, reprising the role in this fine film adaptation, which he also directed, is a pretty good talker in his own right. His voice is a mighty instrument, and if you closed your eyes and just listened to “Fences” you would hear a verbal performance of unmatched force and nuance. More than one, in fact. Ms. Davis, who also starred in that 2010 revival, has fewer lines, but as the story of their marriage unfolds, the center of gravity shifts quietly and inexorably in her direction. Rose’s plain-spokenness is the necessary counterweight to her husband’s grandiloquence.

But even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — “Fences” is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play. The action ventures beyond Troy and Rose’s yard — into their house and onto the street, mostly — to give them a bit more room to move and the audience a little more to look at. Confinement, however, is a theme implied in the play’s title, and opening it up too much would risk diluting the power of watching large personalities colliding in a narrow place.

If the sound were to suddenly fail — or if the dialogue were dubbed into Martian — the impact of the performances would still be palpable. The stories Troy and Rose tell about their lives up until this point are inscribed in their bodies. There is tenderness in the way they approach each other, and an undertow of fatigue as well. In middle age, with a teenage son named Cory (Jovan Adepo), they have settled into habits that are evident in their posture and their gestures. Troy, 53 years old and employed as a sanitation worker, has the coiled strength and physical assurance of the athlete he used to be. He has probably lost some speed on the basepaths, but when he says he could knock a fastball out of the park you believe him.

It’s 1957, though, and time has betrayed him. When in 1947 Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color line, it was too late for Troy, and his bitterness infects his relationship with Cory, who is being scouted for college football scholarships. Troy’s other son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), is a musician, and the dynamic among the three of them is one of the ways “Fences” echoes “Death of a Salesman.” Troy’s betrayal of Rose is another.

To say that the difference between Willy and Troy is racial is to state the obvious and also to risk understating Wilson’s achievement. “Fences” is part of a cycle of 10 plays about the African-American experience that amounts to a critique of the American dream from the standpoint of people intent on defying their exclusion from it. If Willy Loman’s tragedy proceeds from disillusionment, Troy’s redemption is possible because he never had any illusions to begin with. His rigid ideas about work, responsibility and manhood constitute not a demand for attention, but an assertion of dignity. His cruelty, selfishness and shortsightedness are somehow inseparable from his loyalty, his steadfastness and his existential courage.

Rose knows all of this, and helps the audience to see it. As incarnated by Ms. Davis, she is more than a foil and a helpmate. Her relative reticence makes her not just the film’s conscience, but also its central mystery. It falls to Rose to solve the problems her husband has created, to smooth over his relationships with his sons and his brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), a brain-damaged veteran of World War II. She also struggles with a challenge analogous to the one Troy faces, one made more complicated by his role in maintaining it.

“What about my life?” she asks him in the midst of an especially wrenching confrontation. What is most remarkable about this film is how thoroughly — how painfully, how honestly, how beautifully — it answers that question.

Fences Rated PG-13 for hard times and rough language. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

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Film Review: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in ‘Fences’

Denzel Washington directs and stars in a towering screen version of August Wilson's play about a flawed inner-city patriarch. It's compelling, but also top-heavy with importance.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Fences

“ Fences ,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by August Wilson , was written in 1983 and had its premiere on Broadway in 1987. But the play is set 30 years before that, in a lower-middle-class black section of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s, and when you watch it now, in the towering and impassioned screen version directed by its star, Denzel Washington , it feels like you’re seeing a work from a distant time, like “A Raisin in the Sun” crossed with “Death of a Salesman.” For long stretches, that slight period remove works for the movie: “Fences” is an anguished family drama forged out of an exotically old-fashioned sense of destiny. Yet if Wilson’s play is on some level timeless, only rarely does “Fences,” as a movie, hit you in the solar plexus with its relevance. It’s more like a long day’s journey into something weighty and epic and prestigious.

The central character, Troy Maxson, is a bedraggled patriarch with a backbone of pride that rules and defines him. Troy works as a trash collector, and when we first see him, finishing his Friday shift and coming home to greet the weekend the way he always does, by sharing a pint of gin with his grizzled co-worker, Bono (Stephen Henderson), he seems an ebullient and centered man. He’s devoted to Rose ( Viola Davis ), his wife of 18 years, and the sauciness of their back-and-forth teasing lets you know that the feeling is mutual. Troy is so thrifty he claims he can’t afford a TV set, but he has carved out a secure life for his family rooted in their modest brick house. He’s a man shrewd enough to keep his head down and feisty enough to have just asked his supervisor why Pittsburgh has no black sanitation drivers (a chancy question that winds up netting him a promotion to be the city’s first).

Much of “Fences” is set in the Maxsons’ small, cramped patch of backyard, but the film doesn’t feel stagy, because Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s cinematography gives it a crystal-clear flow, and Washington, as both actor and director, gets the conversation humming with a speed and alacrity that keeps the audience jazzed. Wilson’s dialogue is a marvel — soulful, naturalistic, and profane, at moments downright musical in the snap of its cadences. And Washington tears through it with a joyful ferocity, like a man possessed. Which, as we learn, is just what Troy is.

He was once a professional baseball player, a star of the Negro Leagues, but it was Troy’s bitter fate to come along a generation before Jackie Robinson. He never found fortune or fame from baseball, and he can’t accept that the game is now opening up for others. When he dismisses the new black players — and Robinson himself — with a righteous harrumph, claiming that he’s better than all of them, his gripe is rooted in an honest perception of the racist past, but it’s also rooted in the bigheaded wrath of his own ego. Troy doesn’t want anyone to enjoy the success he was denied, and that includes his teenage son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), who has an interview scheduled with a college football recruiter. It’s a doorway to opportunity, but Troy closes it as systematically as Laura’s mother crushes her down in “The Glass Menagerie.”

Troy thinks society will never change for the black man, so he turns that belief into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Of course, it’s also fused with his jealousy.) He comes on like an honorable fellow, and in certain ways he is, but he’s also an unreasonable hard-ass, like the Great Santini with a touch of King Lear. Washington’s performance keeps both sides of Troy in beautiful balance, so that he never seems more humane than when the full extent of his demons is revealed.

“Fences” has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy. As other characters show up, each sheds a ray of light on the real nature of Troy. Lyons (Russell Hornsby), his grown son from a previous relationship, is an easygoing musician who wants more out of life than working a job of grungy drudgery like his father’s, and when he asks Troy for $10, Troy refuses him. His parsimoniousness is a point of pride, and to some degree a valid one, but it’s also rigid and didactic. Then there’s Troy’s brother, Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), who returned from World War II with a metal plate in his head and without all his marbles. Troy took Gabe’s $3,000 disability payout and purchased the house with it, and the energy he pours into justifying that action is a clear sign of how much guilt there is eating away at him. Williamson does a lyrical piece of acting as Gabe, whose mind is half-gone but whose radar picks up on things he isn’t aware of.

The acting is all superb. At the moment Troy’s selfishness is fully revealed, Viola Davis delivers a monologue of tearful, scalding, nose-running agony that shows you one woman’s entire reality breaking down. For a few shattering moments, when she talks about her family of half-brothers and half-sisters, it drags the fallout from America’s racist past right into the glaring light of the present. Yet a drama like this one should build in power, and after a while it begins to dissipate. There’s a resonance to Washington’s performance as a man who has tried to stand up to a daily hurricane of injustice, only to end up betraying his family and himself. But the film has a top-heaviness as well: the gravity of “importance” that can weigh down an awards-season contender. As you watch “Fences,” there’s never a doubt that these lives matter, and that’s a good and noble thing, but you’re also aware (maybe too aware) of how much the movie itself wants to matter.

Reviewed at ArcLight Cinemas, Los Angeles, Nov. 17, 2016. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 133 MIN.

  • Production: A Paramount Pictures release of a Bron Creative, Macro Media, Scott Rudin Prods., Paramount Pictures production. Producers: Todd Black, Scott Rudin, Denzel Washington. Executive producers: Molly Allen, Eli Bush, Jason Cloth, Aaron L. Gilbert, Charles King, Andrew Pollack, Kim Roth, Dale Wells.
  • Crew: Director: Denzel Washington. Screenplay: August Wilson. Camera (color, widescreen): Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Editor: Hughes Winborne.
  • With: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby, Jovan Adepo, Saniyya Sidney.

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Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences.

Fences review – Denzel Washington steps up to the plate

Washington directs and stars in this intelligent and brilliantly cast adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a garbage collector who was once a baseball star

P roducer-director-star Denzel Washington brings his passion project to the screen with distinction, and it’s been rewarded with four Academy Award nominations: picture, actor, actress, adapted screenplay. Fences is a fervent, prolix, stately but beautifully acted drama, its exteriors lovingly photographed in a richly sunlit honeycomb hue. It is an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning 1983 stage play , which has been long in the making; the screenplay was completed by the dramatist himself before he died in 2005. (His Oscar nomination is posthumous.) And how daunting those speeches might have looked on the page to the actors in rehearsal – great dense blocks of text. It’s impossible not to respect the integrity of the performances. But sitting down to this movie sometimes feels like being told to eat up your healthy green vegetables.

Washington himself plays the lead, Troy Maxson, a middle-aged African American in 1950s Pittsburgh working as garbage collector. The action is mainly restricted to his back yard and kitchen, where the painful, primal scenes of domestic tragedy are to take place. Troy was once a baseball star in the professional “Negro leagues” but never made it any higher, a disappointment he ascribes to racism. He claims his vanished glory never gave him so much as a “pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of”. But he is not so much bitter as bleary and cynical – wounded moods that he overcomes or suppresses with charming and almost Falstaffian good humour and a big appetite for the booze. He struts and swaggers with that distinctive Washingtonian walk, angling his body forward with a jolt or jut of the pelvis and hips, like a challenge.

Viola Davis brings her formidable charisma and presence to the role of his wife, Rose, to whom Troy keeps making extravagant and gallant gestures of affection. Russell Hornsby is Troy’s older son, Lyons, a wastrel who comes around on Troy’s payday looking for a loan, but evidently a talented jazz musician. Jovan Adepo is the smart, sensitive younger son, Cory, infuriating his dad with plans for a college football scholarship. Study and practice rule out doing chores or getting an after-school job. Stephen Henderson plays Troy’s drinking buddy Bono, who is audience and enabler for Troy’s big-headed, big-talking flights of fancy.

But Washington shows how Troy is contorted with guilt and shame. His house has been bought with disability money awarded by the army to his learning-impaired brother Gabe (Mykelti Williamson). Brain trauma in the second world war reduced Gabe to a second childhood, and his character periodically shows up to inject the action with instant pathos, sometimes interrupting anguished moments of dialogue, poignantly unaware of what’s happening. Troy himself is scared of dying, scared about his illicit relationship with another woman, scared his sons will turn on him the way he once turned on his own dad. He nags at Cory to help him mend a fence, and broods that some fences keep people in and others out. As a baseball king, he once swung for the fences, those limits of glory that now seem very far off.

There isn’t a single weak link in the cast, and Fences is dense with intelligence and compassion. And yet, at the risk of being facetious or sacrilegious, I can’t help wondering how it would look if they decided to make an actual movie based on August Wilson’s stage play … instead of this impeccably respectful filmed record. How about if the drama ranged further afield, with new scenes at Troy’s workplace, Cory’s school, Lyons’s club, or within Rose’s own life – and scenes showing Troy’s other woman, who is an ostentatious stagey absence? Because it’s possible to admire the technique and the stagecraft and the poetry of the speeches while also feeling them to be perhaps too weighty.

Some of the omissions and the staginess are very well managed and effective. The offstage events between Troy’s final scene and the confrontation between Rose and Cory create their own aching loss. There is similar power in the timeshift between Lyons’s promise as a young jazz musician, yearning for his dad to come to see him play, and later disappointments that appear to be his genetic destiny.

There is a particular refinement of pleasure in watching actors as great as Davis and Washington working together: they duet with hyper-articulate eloquence, and it’s almost like a non-musical opera or secular revivalist meeting. Denzel Washington is a class act, and he has given us a classy piece of work.

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‘fences’: film review.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis reprise their stage roles in Washington's screen adaptation of 'Fences,' the beloved 1950s-set August Wilson play about a black family in Pittsburgh.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Fences is as faithful, impeccably acted and honestly felt a film adaptation of August Wilson’s celebrated play as the late author could have possibly wished for. But whether a pristine representation of all the dramatic beats and emotional surges of a stage production actually makes for a riveting film in and of itself is another matter. Having both won Tony Awards for the excellent 2010 Broadway revival of Wilson’s 1986 Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis know their parts here backward and forward, and they, along with the rest of the fine cast, bat a thousand, hitting both the humorous and serious notes. But with this comes a sense that all the conflicts, jokes and meanings are being smacked right on the nose in vivid close-ups, with nothing left to suggestion, implication and interpretation.

All the same, public reaction to the material likely will be strong, resulting in a much-needed year-end commercial hit for Paramount.

Release date: Dec 25, 2016

One of the most individually successful installments of Wilson’s celebrated “Pittsburgh Cycle,” the 1950s-set Fences alludes not just literally to the barrier middle-aged Troy (Washington) forever procrastinates about building in the small backyard of his modest city home — but to the career and life obstacles he has never managed to surmount either as a baseball player, for which he blames racial restrictions, or in his messy personal life.

It’s a play of poetically heightened realism, with amusing down-home chatter, soaring monologues , boisterous drunken riffs and blunt dramatic confrontations in which Troy bitterly and sometimes cruelly draws the lines between him and those closest to him.

These include his wife Rose (Davis), who loves him, knows all his moods and yet must stoically endure his erratic behavior; teenage son Cory ( Jovan Adepo ), whose school football career Troy cruelly thwarts by projecting his own sports disappointments onto him; Lyons (Russell Hornsby ), Troy’s mild-mannered thirty-something son by a previous marriage, a jazz musician who still comes around asking for money; and younger brother Gabriel ( Mykelti Williamson), whose wartime head injuries have rendered him childlike.

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First look: denzel washington's 'fences' adaptation photos unveiled (exclusive).

Getting off easy among Troy’s intimates is his old pal Bono (Stephen Henderson), and much of the early going is genially dominated by the pair’s increasing high humor as they end their work week as garbagemen with Troy taking out his flask and launching into tall life tales. Rose, having heard it all before, busies herself in the kitchen and alternately resists and succumbs to her husband’s wily way with words.

But modest as his station in life may be, it’s of paramount importance to Troy that he be regarded as the cock of his particular walk, and a great deal of what he does and says is devoted to emphasizing this point. He may make a meager living, but he uses his slim economic advantage and lordly personality to exert a certain droit du seigneur over his immediate circle; “I’m the boss around here,” he likes to remind the others. This is particularly hurtful to Cory, whose dreams his father so unreasonably thwarts, but is also demeaning to his wife and older son. Troy withholds from his loved ones almost as if by instinct, winning on points in the short term but losing in the long run due to what can only be called spiteful meanness.

In his third outing as a big-screen director (after Antwone Fisher in 2002 and The Great Debators in 2007), Washington opens up the play’s action a bit, discreetly moving out onto the street for a stickball game, to a bar and into the city to get the characters out of the house once in a while.

All the same, the film cannot shed constant reminders of its theatrical roots, nor of how different theatrical playwriting is from original screenwriting in this day and age. There were periods, especially through the 1950s and 1960s , when nearly every Broadway and London play of any artistic importance or commercial viability was adapted into a film, when audiences were accustomed to lengthy exchanges and monologues during which characters would basically speechify while being photographed. Now such transfers are a rarity — the last straight play to win a best picture Academy Award was Driving Miss Daisy 27 years ago, and perhaps the three most notable non-musical plays made into films in the past few years, August: Osage County, Carnage and Venus in Fur, went nowhere commercially.

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Due to Fences ‘ star power and innate qualities, this will not be the case for the film , which offers enough dramatic meat, boisterous humor and lived-in performances to hook audiences of all stripes. But just one example of a device that proved acceptable onstage but plays awkwardly onscreen is that of Troy’s brain-damaged brother, who wanders through multiple scenes with a bugle strung around his neck in the manner of any number of kindly “simpleton” characters that used to pop up in plays and literature. Of far more symbolic than dramatic use to the story, Gabriel’s movements and utterances come off as awkward and pretentiously meaningful onscreen in a way that they did not onstage.

As carefully as Washington moves the action around the limited locations, the abundance of long speeches, high-pitched exchanges and emotional depth charges are unmistakably redolent of the stage rather than very closely related to the way films have been written in a very long time. It was perhaps the problem with the film Steve Jobs last year that it was written more like a play than a film, and the sense of excess speechifying and calculated waves of character revelation give the piece an increasingly laborious feel one expects and wants in the theater but that seems somehow alien onscreen.

Fences deals overtly with racial issues almost exclusively in connection with Troy’s resentment over employment opportunities. Insisting that being black is what prevented him from becoming a big league baseball player, he then badmouths the black stars who made the grade in the majors. Of more relevance to his current life is his eventual success in breaking down an absurd racial barrier that has long prevented black trash collectors from moving up to become garbage truck drivers, which pays better. Small victory though it is (and it’s related just anecdotally, not dramatized onscreen), this breakthrough would seem to represent Troy’s most purely admirable accomplishment, especially in light of the big bombshell he drops later on.

Great in these roles onstage, Washington and Davis repeat the honors here, he with quicksilver shifts from ingratiating tall-tale-telling and humor to bulldog-like demands to his wife and offspring that he be treated like the boss king he fancies himself to be. Davis beautifully illuminates the ways in which Rose has learned to live with this man, to be quiet or cut him slack when it’s not worth the effort of a fight, but to make it clear that she has lines she will not allow to be crossed. Despite his delusions and pride, she clearly still loves the guy, and the two make an entirely convincing long-term husband and wife.

Henderson is a joy as Troy’s easygoing straight man, who indulges his old pal’s every whim, joke and complaint, while Adepo well channels the tension and rebellious desires the athletic, straight-arrow son must suck up when his father lays down the law.

Production designer David Gropman and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen create a warmly appealing lived-in ambiance. Playwright Tony Kushner receives a prominent co-producer credit, reportedly for having done the pruning and shaping to bring the three-hour play down to a more screen-friendly length.

Distributor: Paramount Production companies: Bron Creative, Macro, Scott Rudin Productions Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Jovan Adepo , Russell Hornsby , Mykelti Williamson, Saniyya Sidney Director: Denzel Washington Screenwriter : August Wilson, based on his play Producers: Scott Rudin , Denzel Washington, Todd Black Executive producers: Molly Allen, Eli Bush, Aaron L. Gilbert, Jason Cloth, Dale Wells, Charles D. King, Kim Roth Director of photography: Charlotte Bruus Christensen Production designer: David Gropman Costume designer: Sharen Davis Editor: Hughes Winborne Music: Marcelo Zarvos Casting: Victoria Thomas

Rated PG-13, 139 minutes

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Review by Brian Eggert December 27, 2016

fences movie

Fences premiered in 1985 as part of playwright August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a series of ten plays, each of which considers the African-American experience in a specific decade throughout the twentieth century. Fences arrived in the middle, taking place in the 1950s, though the plays debuted between 1982 and 2003. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play introduced theatergoing audiences to Troy Maxson (originally played by James Earl Jones), who bears undeniable similarities to Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman . Troy speaks in longwinded speeches, relaying his blustering ego with hints of a paterfamilias’ wounded exhaustion. The character’s natural place exists on the stage, where his dialogue can be shouted into the modern parterre. During the play’s 2010 revival on Broadway, Denzel Washington used his sizable bombastitude to bring Troy to life. Six years later, the actor returns to the role and also directs the adaptation, which the playwright penned before his death in 2005.

Washington’s already larger-than-life screen presence gets even bigger as Troy, whose uninterrupted talk reveals his complicated life through stories and remembrances. Troy’s monologs and tirades about missed opportunities and his self-sacrificial toiling to preserve his household eventually reveal themselves to be filled with hypocrisy. Listening to Troy are his close friend Bono (Stephen Henderson), who’s always just about to head home, and Troy’s devoted wife Rose (Viola Davis, superb), who has set aside her own life to support her husband and their family. Forced to endure Troy’s remarks are his sons, whom he belittles with every word. In his thirties, the musician Lyons (Russell Hornsby) comes from an earlier marriage and cannot convince his father to listen to his music, even once; meanwhile, the teenaged Cory (Jovan Adepo) loses out on a chance to play college football because of his father’s ego. Troy’s brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), a veteran brain-damaged in World War II, also arrives to interrupt various scenes, his presence a reminder of Troy’s selfishness.

Fences takes place before the Jim Crow laws were abolished and before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but also in a time of rampant change when the Civil Rights Movement would begin to pick up momentum. Someone like Troy—with his punishing Southern upbringing, time in jail, brief stint as a Negro League baseball player, illiteracy, and hard work ethic as a sanitation worker—who remains unwilling to change with the world, becomes a tragic and often pathetic figure. Washington’s performance remains a work of genius, rendering Troy’s complexities, cruelty, and shortsightedness in all their aggressive immediacy. Less successful are the material’s attempts to exalt Troy in the finale, no matter how fondly he’s remembered by Rose or how much he’s influenced the lives of his children. However, in the subtext, and from a historical perspective, Troy stands as a product of his time and a sad reminder of the pre-Civil Rights era (not that it’s gotten much better in the decades since). Nevertheless, as a human being, Troy is also the kind of bastard that seems tolerable only on the American stage.

Indeed, Troy’s awful behavior throughout the film receives an absolute and unlikely sunshine-through-the-clouds forgiveness in the end, sappily created with computer-generated rays that put an artificial touch onto an otherwise authentic dramatic experience. Although the play was staged mostly in the Maxson house and backyard in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Washington finds forced reasons to move the action elsewhere: in a bar, on Troy’s garbage route, outside of his sanitation post, etc. These moments seem less essential to the story than essential to Washington’s presentation of the story on film, creating visual variation for variety’s sake. Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen maintains a prominence of medium shots, resisting close-ups with only a few exceptions, but Fences never becomes a profound visual experience to match its drama.

Watching the film is about savoring the performances and listening to Wilson’s often punishing dialogue, which reveals internalized emotions through outbursts and confrontations. And while the stage offers an up-close-and-personal view of Troy Maxson’s life, the filmic presentation creates a distance between the characters and audience that Washington does not entirely overcome. Washington’s third turn as director (after Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters ), Fences does not make great cinema, even though it makes profound drama. It’s impossible to watch and not be moved. The performances, particularly those of Washington, Davis, and Adepo, radiate from the screen and have a lived-in quality—especially given that Washington and Davis are reprising their Broadway roles here. Painful and honest, Fences remains vital for its writing and acting, but the audience will never forget they are watching a play-to-film adaptation.

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What “Fences” Misses About Adapting Plays for the Screen

fences movie review essay

By Richard Brody

Denzel Washingtons adaptation of the August Wilson play “Fences” boasts committed performances especially by Washington...

Adaptations of plays aren’t cinematically doomed. One of the best movies of the past year, “Moonlight,” is an adaptation of a play ( sort of ); so was the best movie of 2015 (“ Chi-Raq ”); so is the best movie ever (“ King Lear ”). Denzel Washington’s film “Fences,” an adaptation of the play by August Wilson, could well have yielded an excellent movie rather than a turgid one, and consistently inspired performances rather than merely virtuosic ones. It goes without saying that the actors in “Fences,” among them Washington and Viola Davis, are some of the most talented and skillful in the business. But Washington’s filming of the play, despite his evident deep commitment to it, is far less imaginative and less original than Wilson’s creation of the play; the performances resemble theatrical ones and spurn the distinctive exhilarations of movie acting.

Most of the action in “Fences” takes place in one family’s back yard and house—the one belonging to the Maxsons—in Pittsburgh, in the mid-nineteen-fifties. Troy Maxson (Washington), a fifty-three-year-old sanitation worker, is fighting racist restrictions that keep him as a hauler and prevent him from becoming a driver. A vitally energetic man, he’s also fighting his past—a former baseball star who couldn’t play in the major leagues because of segregation, he harshly keeps his younger son, Cory (Jovan Adepo), from playing high-school football and being recruited for college football. He’s hard on his older son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), a struggling musician; he helps to care for his older brother, Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), who was wounded in the Second World War and was left mentally impaired. His best friend and colleague, Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), his sidekick since younger and more troubled days, is a regular presence in his life. Above all, Troy shares his life with his wise, loving, and tireless wife of eighteen years, Rose (Davis), whose steadfast devotion to him is tested when he has an affair—and a child—with another woman.

“Fences” maintains a theatrical sense of scenes and acts; despite its realistic settings and some moments that expand the action into the street and further into the city, it may as well have a curtain to separate them. Movie acting involves position in the frame as much as diction; distance from the camera as much as gestures; angles, light, costume, décor as much as expression. Even more, it’s a matter of tone: the creation not of an imaginary world onscreen but of an actual, unified environment that encompasses what’s on camera and what’s behind the camera. The mark of a failed adaptation is that it leaves a sense of dependence on the source material without making that relationship explicit or developing it in any significant way. Washington, as director, neither emphasizes and heightens the artifice of the theatrical premise nor counteracts it by pressing the physicality of the actors to the fore.

The performances in “Fences” lack intimacy; they feel as if they’re being addressed to audiences in the far balconies, not to one another as actors, not to one another as characters, and not even, as a mode of thought, to the text or to the image. The actors are always on—not on camera but onstage, always needing to do something to be looked at, to sustain an illusion of continuity and a solid block of characterization that the movies don’t require. Movie acting is rooted in innate personal charisma, but the actors in “Fences” (who have plenty of it) assert their presence as if to fill out the space of the stage with the force not of their personal character but of the characters they play. These exertions render the actors absent rather than present; despite their vital energy, deep commitment, and majestic skill, they vanish into the characters and the characters melt into their traits, or, rather, into their dramatic functions. The performance of the text seems like figure skaters’ compulsory routines, not freestyle ones; Wilson’s glorious language, carefully yoked to the drama, doesn’t evoke the emotions that the actors are experiencing but merely substitutes for them.

The best thing in “Fences” is the talk that floats free from the drama—the opening chat between Troy and Bono on the back of the garbage truck, its riffing and ribald continuation in the Maxson back yard with Rose joining in; Troy’s talk with Bono and Lyons about growing up in the Deep South amid family trouble, which turns into Troy’s great monologue about how he came to be on his own at the age of fourteen, walking to Mobile and facing injustices of segregation that he found shocking and that changed the course of his life; and Rose’s great monologue near the end about the inner bargain that she made in marrying Troy. The best single moment in the movie belongs to Davis, when (I’ll avoid spoilers) she reaches a breaking point in her relationship with Troy. It’s a moment so quiet and casual, despite its dramatic thunder, that it seems to need the camera and the microphone to catch it. Though Davis turns toward the camera at that moment, her turn, with her eyes lowered, has such abandon that it seems as if the actress herself had, in a moment of utter possession, forgotten it was there. Davis’s genius is to infuse the high drama with such natural spontaneity; it’s a moment of shared inspiration, Davis’s as actor and Washington’s as director, that displays the spontaneity, the ferocity, and the risk of transformative cinematic freedom that’s lacking in the rest of the film.

It’s the one moment in the film that reaches the heart of theatrical cinema—the moment in which the text itself seems transformed into images. Theatrical performance isn’t antithetical to movies; it’s essential to them—especially when it’s pushed to the extremes that distinguish theatre from movies, when it captures the fear factor of the stage. The thrill of theatre is the sense of menace, of the actor leaping from the stage into the audience, of the actor’s own potential danger. If movies, as Jean Cocteau said, are “death at work,” the theatre is work that confronts the imminent possibility of death. Calamity onscreen can be edited out;  calamity onstage  is an inescapable shadow. Actors directed to deploy and surpass their technique infuse movies with this existential menace, but “Fences” stays within the bounds of its calibrated performances; the actors never threaten to break out of the characters and burst through the screen with explosive physicality.

“Fences” has already won its actors a slew of awards from critics’ groups as well as a couple of Golden Globes nominations. (The ceremony is on Sunday night.) I don’t think these accolades are simply a matter of the honor that’s due the actors themselves, the sheer pleasure in seeing them do such ample and substantial work, although offering awards in praise of great ongoing careers is worthy in itself. Rather, highly rehearsed and technically precise performances of the sort seen in “Fences” mesh with critics’ own familiar technique, the habit and ease of evaluating work in terms of definable standards. Movie acting is a miracle. Onscreen power often emerges full-blown among accidentally discovered performers with little training and little technique; what’s frightening about it is that no effort can develop it—or keep it. The virtuosity of theatrical craft, by comparison, is reassuring in its transmissibility and manageability; it’s nearly quantifiable, which allows critics to play teacher and assign the equivalent of a numerical grade. But the greatest movie acting is too mysterious to be measured. In theatre, actors give; in movies, actors are taken from. In “Fences,” the actors give and give and give; their devotion to Wilson’s words and world is—with only a few exceptions—more moving and more immediately human than their embodiment and development of the characters they portray.

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2016, Drama, 2h 13m

What to know

Critics Consensus

From its reunited Broadway stars to its screenplay, the solidly crafted Fences finds its Pulitzer-winning source material fundamentally unchanged -- and still just as powerful. Read critic reviews

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Fences videos, fences   photos.

Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington) makes his living as a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh. Maxson once dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player, but was deemed too old when the major leagues began admitting black athletes. Bitter over his missed opportunity, Troy creates further tension in his family when he squashes his son's (Jovan Adepo) chance to meet a college football recruiter.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Suggestive References|Language|Thematic Elements)

Genre: Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Denzel Washington

Producer: Scott Rudin , Denzel Washington , Todd Black

Writer: August Wilson

Release Date (Theaters): Dec 25, 2016  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Feb 24, 2017

Box Office (Gross USA): $57.6M

Runtime: 2h 13m

Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Production Co: Paramount Pictures, Sony Classical, Scott Rudin Productions

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Cast & Crew

Denzel Washington

Troy Maxson

Viola Davis

Rose Maxson

Stephen Henderson

Jovan Adepo

Russell Hornsby

Mykelti Williamson

Saniyya Sidney

Christopher Mele

Deputy Commissioner

Leslie Boone

Evangelist Preacher

Jason Silvis

Garbage Truck Driver

August Wilson

Screenwriter

Scott Rudin

Molly Allen

Executive Producer

Aaron L. Gilbert

Andrew Pollack

Charles D. King

Charlotte Bruus Christensen

Cinematographer

Hughes Winborne

Film Editing

Marcelo Zarvos

Original Music

David Gropman

Production Design

Karen Schulz Gropman

Supervising Art Direction

Gregory A. Weimerskirch

Art Director

Rebecca L. Brown

Set Decoration

Sharen Davis

Costume Design

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Critic Reviews for Fences

Audience reviews for fences.

In sparing not a word of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winner, Denzel Washington's brilliant unabridged treatment of his searing family drama packs an emotional wallop thanks to spot-on performances and a narrative that's allowed to breathe because it's not, well, fenced-in. In this PG-13-rated drama, a working-class African-American father (Washington) tries to raise his family (Viola Davis, Jovan Adepo) in the 1950s, while coming to terms with the events of his life. In our hyperlink-filled culture, there are far too many jumping off points before you get the whole story. The long-form has become abridged to accommodate short attention spans. This is not new, however. The works of William Shakespeare have appeared in a digest form pretty much since first hitting the screen. When Kenneth Branagh spent $18 million adapting the entirety of Hamlet into a 4-hour H'Wood film in 1996, the move seemed rather bold. A limited release kept the film from making a profit in theaters, but glowing reviews and awards soon followed. For much the same reason, Washington's latest turn in the director's seat deserves much the same response-if not more because his setting doesn't allow for as much latitude as the certain tale of a Danish prince. And, before any classics muckety muck gets heated with this review for comparing the author of Fences to the Bard, let them be reminded: When it comes to "The Pittsburgh Cycle," you compare Shakespeare to Wilson. It has been said that James Joyce never wasted a single word or piece of punctuation in his career-every last character was carefully chosen and meant something. So too stands the work of Wilson, an always pointed, poetic, and meticulously crafted treatise on American life. Though the writer speaks primarily from the African-American perspective and experience, his beautifully written (though not always beautiful) characters voice a multitude of universal truths. Here, he gets sole credit as screenwriter and every beat of his seminal work remains intact. His Troy, Fences's protagonist AND antagonist, is both a defeated man and often a defeater of other men. His pro-baseball prospects derailed by a stretch in prison, he has survived the ebbs and flows of life, albeit not gratefully. Undeniably charismatic, he flashes moments of warmth. Unfortunately for those in his orbit, these moments come between long stretches of him tearing down his wife and son as he takes out his bitterness with life on them. He is the architect of his own destruction, of course, which makes this flawed character so rich and undeniably human. In his performance of Troy, Washington mines every possible nuance from a man who puts up so many emotional, ahem, fences. It's an electric turn made all the more electric by Davis' amazing role as his long-suffering but dedicated wife, Rose. These two actors perfected their characters' chemistry during a 2010 limited Broadway run, which makes for a dynamic synergy on screen. You believe every peak. You believe every valley. Other characters, such as Troy's mentally challenged younger brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), don't have quite the same impact on the screen as on the stage. Owing to the fact that the character does so much with so little, going big and loud (we're talking the theater space-not the actor, who does an excellent job) almost robs him of a powerful moment at the end. Also, some directors would have sprawled out the canvas to include more locations...to the detriment of the material, however. The definition of faithful adaptation, Washington's take smartly keeps the setting limited. In fact, save for a select number of scenes, the action rarely leaves Troy's property, which hammers home the point of a piece about barriers. Some filmgoers might call that stagey. This review calls it: the whole damn point. To Sum it Up: Great Fences Make Great Viewing

fences movie review essay

What really elevates Fences is the acting. This is a richly written ensemble pieces that heavily relies on powerful performances. Denzel and Viola are reprising their roles from the 2010 Broadway revival. [Incidentally, the original 1987 cast featured James Earl Jones and Mary Alice in those parts.] Needless to say, Washington and Davis know their characters inside and out. Denzel is extremely good and Viola is extraordinary. A woman so fully formed that I was even more drawn to trying to understand this individual. She fascinated me. It may be Troy's story in that every part exists to reflect his personality. However, I found myself sympathizing with her plight a lot more than her husband's. She seizes attention whenever she is on screen. The studio may have marketed her achievement as a supporting role to secure an Oscar nomination (and possible win), but she is no doubt equally important in this context. It's her authentic portrayal, as well as the subdued work of Stephen McKinley Henderson as Troy's friend Jim, that I will remember long after having seen the film. fastfilmreviews.com

Like a long filmed play, Fences at least relies on some outstanding performances that compensate for the film's lack of visual inventiveness. Full review on filmotrope. com

Had I seen the stage version I may have enjoyed this script. However, it's move to the big screen is one which didn't work for me. Instead of enjoying this masterpiece, you're trying to climb the 'Fences' to escape it's clutches.

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Fences

  • A working-class African-American father tries to raise his family in the 1950s, while coming to terms with the events of his life.
  • Troy Maxson makes his living as a sanitation worker in 1950s Pittsburgh. Maxson once dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player, but was deemed too old when the major leagues began admitting black athletes. Bitter over his missed opportunity, Troy creates further tension in his family when he squashes his son's chance to meet a college football recruiter. — Jwelch5742
  • Like most families, everyone has personal demons or secrets that they try to either suppress or conceal in hopes of retaining a sense of normalcy. The movie sheds light on various themes such as family dynamics, personal truths, and above all the power of forgiveness. Fences is a film about an emotionally damaged man who struggles with his past while at the same time trying to provide for his family. However as we dive deeper into the story of Troy Maxon, suppressed emotions and family secrets that were once concealed are now brought to light and test the family dynamics of the Maxon family. — SarcasticRemarks
  • Pittsburgh, mid-1950s. Troy Maxson is a sanitation worker, working a shift with his best friend Jim Bono. Troy has been happily married to Rose for 18 years and they have a teenage son, Cory. Regularly popping in and out of their lives is Gabe, Troy's brother who suffered brain damage while fighting the Japanese in WW2, and Lyons, Troy's 34-year old son from a previous relationship. Troy was a baseball star in the late-1930s, playing in the Negro League, and still bears a grudge for his not being able to play Major League Baseball. He projects this, and other experiences, onto everyone around him, particularly Cory, who has the potential to be a football star. More than just influencing Cory's career prospects (adversely, it appears), Troy has a larger-than-life impact on the lives of everyone around him. — grantss
  • With his dreams of becoming a successful professional baseball player and one of the first coloured athletes in the sport cruelly crushed, 53-year-old Troy Maxson, a working-class toiler who struggles to make ends meet working as a garbage collector in mid-1950s Pittsburgh, is now reduced to an embittered patriarch. But still, Troy is also a proud, high-spirited man who is devoted to his wife for 18 years, Rose, streetwise and tenacious enough to have the future of his family planned and protected under the roof of their humble and hard-earned house. On the other hand, although this may be true, Troy has well-kept skeletons in the closet, which coupled with his suppressed emotions stemming from the town's racist past, prevent him from allowing anyone to benefit from everything that he was denied, including his very son Cory, an aspiring college football player. Sometimes, we build fences to keep others out, while other times, we build them to keep ourselves in. — Nick Riganas
  • The film takes places in Pittsburgh in 1956. Troy (Denzel Washington) and Bono (Stephen Henderson) work as trash collectors in Pittsburgh. Troy complains that they never hire colored men for the driving; they always have to do the lifting. Bono asks about a girl that he's seen Troy eyeing at the bar they frequent. Troy claims he just bought her a drink and that hes never chased women after marrying Rose. The two get to Troy's house where they are greeted by Rose (Viola Davis). She asks if Bono is going to stay for supper. He says hes going home for pig feet. Troy says hes going to go home with Bono unless she can top that; Rose tells him shes cooking chicken. Rose and Troy are affectionate with each other and recall marrying each other 18 years earlier. She tells him that their son, Cory, has been recruited by a college football team. He tells her the white men aren't going to let a "colored boy" play football. Rose tells Troy he's going to drink himself to death, as he is drinking a whole bottle of gin while he chats. He tells her about a time Death visited him when he had pneumonia and he threw Deaths sickle and the two wrestled. After three days, Death gave up but promised to be back. Troy's 34-year-old son Lyons (Russell Hornsby) (a product of a previous relationship) comes over. Troy notes that he only comes to visit on paydays. Sure enough, Lyons asks to borrow $10 which he promises to pay back. Troy complains that his other son doesn't have a bed and that he himself can't get any credit. He claims that he only has their furniture because a man sold it to him one day and hes paid $10 every month for 15 years to avoid losing it; but after this long speech, Rose points out that Troy's lying and they got the furniture from someone else. Troy tells Lyons to get a decent job but Lyons says he doesn't want a service job; hes a musician. This irks Troy who reminds Lyons the only reason he has money is because he works as a garbage man and Lyons is no better than him. Lyons says they are two different people and he needs to do something with his life that makes him feel like he has a purpose. Rose demands Troy give him $10. When Troy hands over the payday money to her, she takes ten dollars out for Lyons. He thanks her and promises to give it back to his dad. Rose hangs laundry in the yard and sings a song about Jesus being a fence around her. Troy tells Rose the commissioner wants to meet him to discuss his job but he is optimistic he wont be fired. The two hear singing and find Gabe (Mykelti Williamson), Troy's brother, in the street, being chased by a group of kids. Gabe sings a song about plums he's selling but then tells Rose that he doesn't have any plums; it becomes evident he is mentally handicapped. Gabe tells Troy he saw St. Peters book for Judgment Day and Troys name is there and he knows Roses is in there but he hasn't seen it. Gabe believes he sees hellhounds and rushes off, singing a song about the Judgment Day. Troy and Rose discuss how Gabe's had brain damage after going to war and getting half his head blown off which is now held together with a metal plate. He received $3,000 from the US Army and that is how Troy was able to afford to purchase the house he lives in. Gabe lived with them until recently and now he moved out to live with a neighbor, Miss Pearl, so he can be more independent. Troy leaves to go watch the baseball game on the TV at a local bar he frequents, even though he was supposed to be building a fence. Time passes. Rose and Troy's teenaged son, Cory (Jovan Adepo) comes home from football practice at his high school, still wearing his football uniform. Rose tells Cory that his dad is upset with him for not being home to do chores or help him with the fence. Cory tells his mom that his dad always leaves on Saturdays to go to the bar. Cory goes inside and Troy returns home. She asks him about the game but he doesn't know (hinting that maybe he wasn't at the bar like he suggested). Troy finds Cory and argues with him about not doing his chores; Cory explains he had football practice. Troy demand Cory help him build the fence and they begin cutting boards. Cory asks his dad if they can get a TV. Troy says a TV set costs at least $200 and fixing the roof is $264. So if he had the money, he would fix the roof so it doesn't leak when it begins to snow or rain. Cory tells him he can put a down payment down on the TV but Troy says he doesn't want to owe anyone anything because if he misses one payment, they'll take the TV and keep his money. Troy says that if Cory comes up with $100, he will put up the other half. Cory has a job at the local A&P supermarket but he tells his dad that hes had his hours reduced because of football practice. Troy is furious and says Cory will never get to play football because the white man wont allow it. When Cory counters this with all the examples of black ballplayers, Troy continues to debate. Cory tells his dad about the recruiter from North Carolina who's coming to see him and asks his dad to sign permission papers but Troy refuses, insistent Cory go immediately to ask for his full-time job back, despite an arrangement where its being held for him until after football season. Cory responds by asking Troy why he never liked him. Troy tells him that nobody said he had to like him Cory eats every day and has a roof over his head and clothes on his back because Cory is his responsibility. Liking him isn't required. Cory leaves to seemingly ask for his job back. Rose has been listening from nearby and asks Troy why Cory cant play football. Troy says he doesn't want Cory to end up like him, not able to get into the Major Leagues. Rose points out that Troy didn't tryout until he was much older and wont admit to himself he wasn't young enough. Troy remains insistent that its because he was black. Troy is waiting in the Commissioners Office. He is called in. When he returns home, he excitedly tells his wife that he wasn't fired but actually promoted hes going to be the first colored man to be a driver in their city (instead of the one collecting the garbage). He suggests hell get to read the newspaper like his driver did but we learn he doesn't know how to read or to drive. He shrugs off not having a license, stating all you do is point the car where you want to go. Lyons stops by and Troy is sure he's going to ask for more money since its payday again. But Lyons actually is returning the $10 he borrowed. Troy refuses to take it and insists Lyons keep it for the next time he needs $10. Lyons finally gives it to Rose, insistent he repay his debt. Gabe enters the house, singing about the Judgment Day. He thinks Troy is mad at him for moving in with Miss Pearl. Rose tells him its nice for Gabe to come and go and also that Troy should sign Cory's recruiter papers to let him play football. Troy tells everyone how his dad didn't care about his kids and he had 11 of them. He tells a story about his dad whipping him for kissing a 13-year-old girl, only to learn he was mad because he wanted her for himself. And that's when he became a man and started whipping his dad; he then moved out on his own, at 14. He made his living as a robber and met Rose and had Lyons, then went to jail for 15 years where he met Bono and learned to play baseball. It wasn't until he was released, at 30 years old, that he tried out for the Major Leagues, confirming Roses theory that it was his age and not his race that kept him from being recruited. Cory comes home in his football uniform and throws his helmet in the direction of Troy. He says that Coach Zellman told him he cant play football anymore and for the recruiter not to come. Troy had learned that Cory didn't ask for his job to be reinstated, so he demanded that the coach pull him from the team. Cory points out that the job was being held for him until football practice is over and that his dad never listens to him. He screams that his dad is just worried that hes going to be more successful than him. Referencing the football helmet he threw, Troy tells him he swung the ball and didn't hit which was strike one. He'd better not strike out two more times. Another day, in the backyard, Cory hits a baseball tied to a tree. His mom joins him and he tells her he isn't quitting the team, even if his dad demands it. Rose tells him shell talk to her husband as soon as he gets back from bailing Gabe out of jail he was arrested for disturbing the peace. Troy and Bono return home and Troy explains he gave them $50 to get Gabe out of jail and theorizes that they just wanted money from him. Bono and Troy begin working on the fence. They complain that the wood is too tough to cut through. Cory joins them and is able to cut through the wood easily. Troy asks why Rose wants a fence anyway. Bono tells him Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. After Cory leaves to go find a saw, Bono points out Rose loves Troy and they've been married for 18 years; he then asks about another woman that he suspects Troy of fooling around with. He points out that eventually hell have to cut one of them loose and his family should be his priority. Troy changes the subject and asks Bono when hes going to get a refrigerator for his wife. Bono responds that when Troy finishes the fence, hell buy her one. He then leaves, stating that he doesn't want to help him with the fence now; he has to protect himself from buying a fridge and knows it will take Troy six months to finish without his assistance. Rose asks Troy about Gabe's arrest. He explains that he paid $50 for his bail and there will be a hearing in a few weeks to determine whether Gabe should be locked up in an asylum. He was charged with being too loud while scaring away some kids that were picking on him. Rose thinks a hospital might be a good place for Gabe but Troy insists he remain free since hes not hurting anyone. As she prepares lunch, Troy tells Rose he has something to tell her hes going to be a dad. This is how she learns that hes been having an affair. Gabe shows up in the house, interrupting to give Rose a rose he has picked. Rose suggests Gabe get a watermelon and he leaves. She then becomes furious, pointing out that shes been loyal to Troy for 18 years and now hes done this to her. She grew up in a family where all her siblings were only half-related to her and she never wanted that for her children. He tells her this other woman helps him feel differently about himself and with her, he doesn't have to worry about all his family problems. She responds by saying she gave up her whole life for his, even though she knew he wasn't going anywhere; she feels just as stuck as he does but never betrayed him. She says he takes and never gives, which infuriates Troy and he grabs Roses arm, which makes her scream out. Cory rushes in and attacks Troy, punching him and knocking him to the ground. Troy lunges at Cory but is stopped short by Rose. He tells Cory that is strike two and then Troy leaves the house. Six months have passed. Rose and Troy no longer speak even though he still lives in the home. This changes when Rose asks Troy if hes coming home after work the following day he usually spends Fridays at the house of the woman he was having an affair with but always claims hes at the bar. She asks that he come straight home and that she isn't going to be patient with him anymore. He reveals that he's actually going to the hospital to see the other woman, who went into labor months early. Rose tells Troy that Gabe has been taken to the asylum after Troy signed papers arranging for half of Troys government checks to be rerouted to him, with the other half going to the hospital. Troy admits, because he cant read, he thought the papers simply allowed Gabe's release from jail. Rose then expresses her anger at Troy not signing the papers for Cory to go to college to play football, yet signing papers for his brother to be locked up in a mental hospital. The phone rings and Rose takes the call, learning that Troy's daughter has been born but the mother has died in childbirth. Troy walks into the yard and starts screaming at Death, as he did earlier. He challenges Death to come for him after he finishes the fence, in a one-on-one, man to man battle. A few days later, Troy comes home with his baby daughter, Raynell. Rose finally decides to take in the baby as her own, citing You cant visit the sins of the father upon the child. She rejects the idea that Troy will be welcomed back into her life though. Two months go by. Lyons enters the house to return $20 he borrowed from Troy. Cory walks home, stopping to look at a marines uniform in the window of a recruiting office. When he enters his house, he is greeted by Lyons. Cory tells him that he wasn't allowed to go to college to play football so now hes looking for a job. Troy comes home with his payday money but Rose is more independent now and leaves for church without asking permission from Troy. Troy goes outside and sings a song about his old dog, Blue. Bono stops by and Troy notes that they haven't seen her each other much since Troy got promoted to drive a truck in a white neighborhood. Troy heard that Bono bought his wife a refrigerator; he says he had heard Troy finally finished the fence. Bono leaves to play a game of dominoes at his house. Troy stays behind, drinking and singing the song about his dog, Blue. Cory enters the backyard but can't get into the home because Troy is sitting in the middle of the steps. He tries to walk over him. Troy is argumentative, stating its his house that he paid for and Cory needs to say excuse me. Cory stands up to his dad and wont acknowledge what he was given because its material things and he never gave him love and care, citing how he betrayed his mother. Troy says that Cory is "just another nigger on the street" to him. Cory responds by saying the house that Troy is bragging about owning should actually be owned by Gabe because his government checks provided the payments. Troy shoves Cory so Cory retaliates by swinging the baseball bat in the yard at Troy. Troy manages to get the bat away from Cory and stands over him with the bat, then kicks him out of the house. Cory walks away, saying hell only be back to collect his things. Troy tells him hell have Cory's things on the other side of the fence since hes not allowed back in the house. After Cory leaves, Troy begins swinging the baseball bat, taunting Death again, feeling energized by having gained the upper hand on Cory. He says he will put up a fight when Death comes. Seven years have gone by. Raynell is now a little girl, waiting for the seeds she planted to grow in her garden. Rose comes outside and tells Raynell to get ready for Troy's funeral as he just died from a heart attack when swinging his baseball bat (which we know is him confronting Death as he always suggested he would). Cory comes home in his US Marines uniform, now a Corporal. Lyons joins the family inside and he chats with Cory, revealing his girlfriend broke up with him and also that he has to do time after being caught cashing other peoples checks. He admits hes still playing music though and that it helps him get out of bed in the morning. Cory tells his mom he is not going to be attending his dad's funeral. He explains that he cant drag his dad with him everywhere he goes; one time in his life, hes got to say no. She tells him this is the time to put that aside and not going to his funeral isn't going to make him a man. Cory insists that his dad was like a shadow that followed him everywhere but Rose said that shadow was just him growing into himself. Rose gives a speech about loving Troy, even though he was flawed and hurtful. She adds that while she was at first upset about Raynell, now she has taken her in on as her own daughter and Rose is going to give her the best life she can. Raynell finds Cory outside and she asks if he knows about Troy's dog, Blue. They both begin singing the song Troy always sang about his dog, Blue, showing that they have their father in common despite not knowing each other (since Cory was in the Marines for six years). By the end of the song, Cory is too choked up to continue. Gabe arrives at the house, even though he was confined to a mental hospital. He holds his trumpet and says its time for St. Peter to open up the gates of Heaven for Troy. At first, Gabe blows the trumpet but no sound comes out. But then he tries again and a low note resounds from the instrument. They all look up at the sky and see the sun has appeared from behind clouds Heaven has opened up as Gabe always said it would. Gabe casually tells them, "That's the way that go" and exits.

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Film Evaluation and Review of Fences

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Fences , Movie Review , Movie Summary

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August Wilson’s “Fences” Play vs. Movie Comparison Essay

The primary idea behind August Wilson’s Fences script is that people’s environment shapes them, and despite the noble intentions of their parents, they might end up messing up their children’s lives. Wilson portrays this concept of identity and family through a film and play. There are significant differences between the two pieces regarding characterization, setting, film angles or camera movements, and lighting.

The first difference is that the movie has more sets compared to the consistent house-front used in the play. Characters occasionally enter the house in the movie compared to the play, which is acted at the same place throughout. However, the dialogue and spots are the same with the said characters in both creations. Secondly, regarding characterization, the movie keeps some characters off-screen, such as Alberta, who is mentioned but does not show up on set. Additionally, the movie has twisted some parts to make them more dramatic, like the scene where Rose is not shown initially as Troy talks to his son. Subsequently, this makes the audience believe that Rose is absent and later reveals that she was there.

Another similarity is that the selection of the movie cast was appropriate because they suited their character representations in the play. The characters fit their descriptions and behaviors and explained in the play. For instance, Viola Davis accurately played the role of Rose Maxson as a strong woman who holds things together despite all challenges. Additionally, the movie’s lighting was perfect as it suited the era in which the creation was based – during the 1950s. It accurately reflected the visual mood, atmosphere and era highlighted in the play. Finally, the film includes skies time-lapse and a montage to show different periods, making it more interesting to the audience. In contrast, the stage production consists of a playbill to signify the exact time passage between acts and scenes.

To conclude, the Fences movie accurately brought out the main themes of the play – family, identity, and racism. The off-screen technique gives the film a sense of life outside Troy’s house. The film maintains a sense of theatrical acts and scenes, making it dependent on the source creation without significant development. Conclusively, the movie was more enjoyable because of the actors chosen to represent the characters. One could follow through with the play and relate to the emotion they portrayed.

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  1. Fences movie review & film summary (2016)

    Every payday brings Troy Maxson closer to his wrestling partner. This repeated scenario forms the basis of August Wilson 's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "Fences." 29 years after its Broadway premiere, "Fences" arrives in theaters courtesy of a screenplay by the late playwright himself. With two Pulitzer Prizes and his ten-play magnum ...

  2. Review: Beneath the Bombast, 'Fences' Has an Aching Poetry

    NYT Critic's Pick. Directed by Denzel Washington. Drama. PG-13. 2h 19m. By A.O. Scott. Dec. 15, 2016. By the end of "Fences," we will have learned a lot about Troy Maxson — about his hard ...

  3. Film Review: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in 'Fences'

    Camera (color, widescreen): Charlotte Bruus Christensen. Editor: Hughes Winborne. With: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby, Jovan Adepo, Saniyya ...

  4. Fences review

    Fences is a fervent, prolix, stately but beautifully acted drama, its exteriors lovingly photographed in a richly sunlit honeycomb hue. It is an adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer-winning ...

  5. Review Of The Film Fences: Free Essay Example, 622 words

    Views: 3715. Grade: 5. Download. Fences is a 2016 drama film starring and directed by Denzel Washington, based on the 1987 play written by August Wilson. The film follows a 53-year-old black man, Troy Maxson, in 1950s Pittsburgh who struggles to support his family as a waste collector. Instead of supporting his sons' dreams, Troy is trapped ...

  6. The Movie Fences Film Analysis

    The Movie Fences Film Analysis. Fences is a drama film directed and starred by Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award Winner, Viola Davis as well as adapted from the play Fences by August Wilson. The movie Fences focuses with elements of distrust and change among a working-class African-American father Troy Maxson, works as a garbage ...

  7. 'Fences' Review

    By Todd McCarthy. November 22, 2016 7:00am. Fences is as faithful, impeccably acted and honestly felt a film adaptation of August Wilson's celebrated play as the late author could have possibly ...

  8. Fences (2016)

    Fences premiered in 1985 as part of playwright August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle," a series of ten plays, each of which considers the African-American experience in a specific decade throughout the twentieth century.Fences arrived in the middle, taking place in the 1950s, though the plays debuted between 1982 and 2003.Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play introduced theatergoing ...

  9. What "Fences" Misses About Adapting Plays for the Screen

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  11. Fences: Drama Film Directed by Denzel Washington

    This essay has been submitted by a student. Fences is a 2016 drama film starring and directed by Denzel Washington, based on the 1987 play written by August Wilson. The film follows a 53-year-old black man, Troy Maxson, in 1950s Pittsburgh who struggles to support his family as a waste collector. Instead of supporting his sons' dreams, Troy ...

  12. Film Evaluation and Review of Fences Free Essay Example

    Download. Review, Pages 5 (1180 words) Views. 1. The film selected for this topic essay is "Fences,' directed by Denzel Washington and based on August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The plot takes place in the 1950s in Pittsburgh, where the characters are part of the Afro American community, rising to more freedom and ...

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  14. Fences: Study Guide

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  16. Fences (2016)

    Fences is a film about an emotionally damaged man who struggles with his past while at the same time trying to provide for his family. However as we dive deeper into the story of Troy Maxon, suppressed emotions and family secrets that were once concealed are now brought to light and test the family dynamics of the Maxon family.

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  18. Review And Analysis Of The Movie Fences Free Essay Example

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  20. August Wilson's "Fences" Play vs. Movie Comparison Essay

    We will write a custom essay on your topic. The first difference is that the movie has more sets compared to the consistent house-front used in the play. Characters occasionally enter the house in the movie compared to the play, which is acted at the same place throughout. However, the dialogue and spots are the same with the said characters in ...

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    Fences, By August Wilson. Fences written by August Wilson is an award winning drama that depicts an African-America family who lives in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania during the 1950's. During this time, the Mason's reveal the struggles working as a garbage man, providing for his family and excepting life as is.

  22. fences movie review essay

    Denzel Washington directs and stars in a towering screen version of August Wilson's play. It's compelling but also top-heavy with... 138 min. Release Date: 12/25/2016. fences movie. Fences premiered in 1985 as part of playwright August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle," a series of... Topic Fences , Movie Review , Symbolism.