A strong cast lifts 'The Piano Lesson'

  Members of the Washington family -- as in Denzel, Malcolm, and John David -- are playing a major role in preserving the literary legacy of the late August Wilson, at least on screen. It has been eight years since Denzel Washington directed and starred in Fences, but the deep connection between Wilson's material and the Washingtons continues.

    For the latest entry, The Piano Lesson, Denzel Washington serves as one of the film's producers. His son -- director Malcom Washington -- offers a screen version of The Piano Lesson, one of 10 pieces in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle. 

  Ma Rainy's Black Bottom (2020), another play in the cycle, was directed by George C. Wolfe with Denzel Washington as one of the film's producers.

   Marked by inspired acting and richly colored cinematography, The Piano Lesson features John David Washington, the oldest of Denzel's four children, as Boy Willie, a young man who arrives in Pittsburgh during the 1930s with hopes of selling an elaborately carved piano that has become a prized family possession. 

   When Boy Willie's sister Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler) refuses to sell, a drama about memory, family history, and heritage begins to take shape.

 A strong supporting cast adds to the movie's richness. Samuel L. Jackson portrays Doaker, a family uncle who presides over the house where Bernice and her 11-year-old daughter (Skylar Aleece Smith) also live. They've become the northern branch of the family.

 Corey Hawkins plays Avery, a Pittsburgh man who wants to marry Bernice and establish himself as a local preacher. Michael Potts appears as Doaker's older brother, a former piano player and heavy drinker who adds jolts of live wire energy whenever he's on screen. 

  Adapted from Wilson's play by Malcom Washington and Virgil Williams, the movie uses a ghostly reminder of the Old South to symbolize the lingering oppression that the family tried to escape by moving north. It struck me as a bit too literal.

  This part of the play, complete with an exorcism, rattles the screen but doesn't go down easily. Attempts to open the confinement of an essentially  one-room drama are semi-successful.

   But Wilson’s strength, his ability to find characters who encapsulate and enrich depictions of Black American life remains and his themes (family tensions, crushed dreams) have broad reach.

   Malcom Washington's debut directorial effort gives a strong ensemble cast an opportunity to bring memorable life to Wilson's richly drawn characters. They take full advantage of it. So should we.*

*The Piano Lesson currently is available for streaming on Netflix.

A gloomy helping of Dracula and gore

 

Sailors aren't the only victims in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a movie based on a single chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Hope dies, as well. I'm talking about the hope for a movie that might have become a worthy addition to cinema's voluminous vampire library. What we get instead is a heaping helping of portentous drama. Noisy and boring, Last Voyage deprives Dracula of any twisted charm, turning him into a ravenous beast with exceptionally bad teeth. The trailer offers a glimpse of what Dracula looks like when in full vampiric bloom. Early on, we learn that Dracula has organized a voyage in which he will be shipped from Transylvania to London in a crate big enough to hold a refrigerator. Director Andre Ovredal makes it clear from the start that he's after a tale that reeks of foreboding. Most of the story takes place on the Demeter, where we meet the ship's doctor (Corey Hawkins), the ship's captain (Liam Cunningham), and the dour first mate (David Dastmalchian). As crew members succumb to Dracula, the filmmakers display a fair measure of fleshy gore. Toby (Woody Norman), the captain's grandson, is also on board. Although the movie is short on suspense, we wonder how far the filmmakers will go. Will young Toby wind up as vampire food? A woman (Aisling Franciosi) is found in one of the 50 crates that have been stowed in the Demeter's hold. She knows how relentless Dracula can be. The filmmakers seem to be striving for symphonic swells of terror as the sailors face a terrible evil. But atmospherics can carry a movie only so far and The Last Voyage of the Demeter sinks under the weight of its unrelieved gloom.

A stark and powerful 'Macbeth'

 

   The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film from a Coen brother.

    I put it that way because director Joel Coen takes on  Shakespeare with The Tragedy of Macbeth and, yes, it feels weird to talk about a film with the name Coen attached without following with the word "brothers."

    The result of Joel Coen's solo effort is visually striking, intense, and bursting with fury.

     Employing an old-time aspect ratio and cutting through dark swaths with paths of white light, Coen simplifies the movie’s environment while simultaneously amping up its power.

     He opts for minimal but suggestive design. A castle still feels like a castle — albeit one you might find in an Ingmar Bergman film.

     I begin there because what stayed with me about Coen’s movie was its atmosphere and visual poetry, the way Coen married Shakespeare and back-and-white imagery of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel.

    Coen and his team allow Macbeth to strike its own pose. And I don't mean "pose" in a pejorative sense, I mean it the sense of a movie that has the power of a starkly drawn silhouette.

    Coen isn’t trying to make Macbeth feel “real;” he bends cinematic convention to allow Shakespeare’s story and language a place where tragedy gathers force.

    A grizzled Denzel Washington provides the centerpiece of the drama. Washington doesn’t underline the play's great monologues  ("Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow"). You won’t catch him orating; he delivers the dialogue as if it were his own speech.

    Washington's performance brims with emotional undercurrents, perhaps driven by the guilt that accrues to Macbeth as a result of killing his king (Brendan Gleeson) and then slaughtering rivals and their families. He even turns on his best friend and ally Banquo, a fine Bertie Carvel.

    Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) encourages Macbeth in his murderous ways, prompted by the king’s announcement that he plans to make his son Malcolm (Harry Melling) his successor. 

    Washington makes Macbeth's attitude less a matter of naked ambition than of reaction to a slight: Macbeth, who looks ready for an AARP membership, fought tirelessly for the king and never got his proper reward. If his anger has a modern equivalent, it's getting passed over for a promotion someone thought he had earned.

    All the actors rise to the occasion. Corey Hawkins makes a fine Macduff, perhaps the best and most human of the characters.

    Coen does a wonderful job with a bizarre and unforgettable performance from Kathryn Hunter as the witch who offers her prediction: Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor and then king. Coen suggests the presence of Shakespeare's three witches by using a reflecting pool and adding ominous circling crows. 

   Hunter's performance is haunting enough to take the place of a half dozen witches, had Shakespeare wanted to increase their number.

   Coen’s Macbeth seldom finds itself idling and, thanks to a pared-down text, moves quickly toward a conclusion in which he makes it clear that, for him, Macbeth speaks loudly about dark forces that can be unleashed but seldom controlled.  

   This Macbeth screams when it needs to scream.

'In the Heights' hits lots of high notes

 

     With In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda established himself as a major figure in American musical theater. Miranda followed In the Heights with Hamilton, the production that took Broadway and then the nation by storm. 

    Now In the Heights has reached the big screen where it serves as a vibrant celebration of the Washington Heights neighborhood that has become a center of New York Dominican culture, broadened here to encompass a variety of Latino ethnicities living in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

    The message behind the energy that director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and a fine cast bring to the movie involves identity and assertiveness, insistence of characters on building lives in New York while keeping their culture close at hand.

   A large-scale ensemble piece, the movie nonetheless centers around Usnavi de la Vega played by Anthony Ramos in a commanding performance. Ramos narrates the story and also participates in the tale as a bodega owner who, in the movie's framing device, tells a group of youngsters how he wrestled with the idea of giving up his New York business and emigrating to the Dominican Republic to open a nightclub.

    Scenes in the bodega make good use of Gregory Diaz IV, who plays Sonny, Usnavi's teen assistant, a kid who wants to legalize his presence in the US, attend college, and make a life for himself.

    Chu introduces the movie in a way that makes it clear that he's telling the story of a neighborhood, showing us a block springing to life on a hot summer day. To underscore the challenges of big-city living, a crippling power outage looms.

    A large case keeps things lively, but a few of the performances must be highlighted.  Leslie Grace plays Nina, a young woman who has returned to the neighborhood after dropping out of Stanford, where she didn't feel accepted and where she felt she was betraying her roots. 

    Nina's father (Jimmy Smits) owns the cab company where Nina's boyfriend (Corey Hawkins) works as a dispatcher.

    Most of the movie's themes revolve around the issue of flight, how to balance aspiration with faithfulness to heritage.

    -- Smits's character is ready to sell his business to finance Nina's tuition.

    -- Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) runs the local hair salon and is thinking about moving her business to the Grand Concourse, abandoning Manhattan for the Bronx.

    -- Melissa Barrera portrays Vanessa, a young woman who wants to abandon the Heights to establish herself in the downtown fashion world.  

     The beating heart of the neighborhood belongs to Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a Cuban-American woman who has no children but who has become a grandmother figure for the entire neighborhood.   

     Merediz sings one of the movie’s key songs, Paciencia y Fe  (Hope and Patience), which Chu stages in a New York subway station.

    Chu adds some nice graphics and effects flourishes, one involving a spinning manhole cover, another enabling Grace and Hawkins to scale the side of an apartment building as they sing a love duet. 

     Other highlights include a number at the local pool, where the characters wondering what they'd do if they had a winning lottery ticket that would pay $96,000.

    Miranda appears in the role of Piraguero, the guy who sells flavored ice from a pushcart.

    When I lived in New York, Washington Heights was known as an Irish neighborhood, a fact to which the screenplay makes glancing reference. Smits’s character bought his business from an Irish-American who was moving elsewhere.

    The movie's themes aren't exactly groundbreaking, but new voices give the entire enterprise an invigorating feeling of freshness.

     Chu and Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the movie's screenplay, might have done a bit more to condense a two-hour and 23-minute run time, but In the Heights stands as a rich and spirited entertainment that brims with love for a neighborhood and the people who populate it. 

    Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a lot of fun?