Director: Malcolm Washington
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler
Have I Seen It Before: No. This was the first film I saw for the Santa Fe International Film Festival this year. A full-week pass to a film festival is a strange thing. You look at a list, see a quick description of a film (or a series of films, if it’s an exhibition of short subjects), see if tickets are still available (they often aren’t, I missed a few things over the week to this struggle), see if it conflicts with anything else that you’re wanting to see or support, and then see if you’re interested in the film.
Did I Like It: A stage play adapted to film is always a tricky thing. Something like Dracula (1931)--which has far more to do with the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than it did Stoker’s novel—came so early in the era of the talking picture that the camera just sort of sits there while the play is performed in front of it. The big musicals of the turn of the centuries knew they had to embrace the trappings of the big screen and delivered their spectacle. I can’t help but watch this film and feel as if the act of adaptation was not fully fulfilled. Pointedly cinematic scenes are added that I can’t imagine existed in the original August Wilson play—mainly depicting the creation and heist of the titular piano—but these feel somewhat tacked on.
The cast is terrific, but the majority of them are transplants from a recent Broadway revival of the play.
The themes are well constructed, and I’ve been thinking about them for most of the week since screening it. Are the ghosts real, or is the metaphor of being haunted by your past more potent? The film manages to not conclusively answer the question, while at the same time not feeling as if the story is cheating in the ambiguity.
And yet, would I have been better off watching a staging of the play? I wonder.