![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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”). ![]() Adaptations of plays aren’t cinematically doomed. ![]()
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