Seeing August Wilson’s play Fences on Broadway in 1987 was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life. This study of a 53-year-old garbageman named Troy Maxson—who struggles every moment to maintain his dignity and restrain the rage of a black man in 1950s Pittsburgh who was denied his chance to play baseball in the segregated major leagues—simply overpowered me. Troy is one of the stage’s master talkers, a peerless storyteller and raconteur despite (or perhaps because of) his illiteracy. He creates legends about the house he owns, the joys of his marriage to the wife he supports, and takes unabashed pride in the fact that he gets through the week without exploding at the daily humiliations of his existence.
Fences is the story of how Troy hurts and betrays everyone he knows and loves because he cannot talk himself out of the hunger for a larger life than the one he has painstakingly, and even heroically, built. Fences is constructed on the model of Death of a Salesman, but while it doesn’t quite match Arthur Miller’s play for raw power, it does not have to strain for the social significance Miller sought to layer falsely onto his small family tragedy. Willy Loman is not undone by powerful forces; he is, in the end, a weak and deluded man. Troy Maxson is a man with greatness inside him brought down low by a structural social injustice August Wilson does not need to spell out for us.
Troy was played, in that 1987 Broadway production, by James Earl Jones in a landmark performance that can only be described as titanic in its impact. If what you know of Jones is the voice of Darth Vader, you have no idea how colossal he could be in his own person at the height of his acting powers. Full of high good humor and cheer, Jones’s Troy seemed like he could go off like an atomic bomb at any moment. When his teenage son asked plaintively why Troy doesn’t like him, Jones rumbled in his great basso voice:
This speech, much abridged here, is one of the great moments of the American theater—a classic stage confrontation between a lesser and a greater power in which what matters most goes unspoken.
But it’s not one of the great scenes in recent American movies, and that is the problem with the new film adaptation of Fences, of which Denzel Washington is both director and star. Washington’s Troy Maxson is not a force of nature, a great-souled man, a King Lear trapped in Pittsburgh. He’s a smart, wily, angry, likable guy, and he can’t make you believe (as Jones did) that he might actually and genuinely dislike his own son—or as happens at the play’s most staggering moment, that he might be so disfigured with rage that he could kill his own child. Washington is a wonderful actor, but either because he can’t or couldn’t bear to, he never reaches the raw depths James Earl Jones plumbed before him. He gets the charm but he mimes the fury—and so does his movie, which simply cannot produce the pity and terror that Aristotle tells us are the generative power of the stage tragedy.
This isn’t to say that Fences should not be seen. It should. It’s a careful and highly respectable version of Wilson’s play. Washington played Troy in a revival on Broadway in 2010, and he is clearly such an admirer of Wilson’s astounding way with theatrical dialogue that he wanted to replicate it as closely as he could. He is joined in his efforts by Viola Davis, who plays Troy’s loving and loved and betrayed wife Rose about as perfectly as anyone could play anything. She’s so good, in fact, that she throws the movie a bit out of whack. Rose herself says that she has submerged herself in Troy to her detriment, so it does something odd to the dynamic between the characters that Rose steals the show.
I can think of only two adaptations of American plays that work better on screen than they do on the stage. One is Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, which is far sharper and funnier and uses the crumbling New York of the 1970s as a beautiful analogue to the crumbling old man played by Walter Matthau. The other is Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize winner. Mamet wrote the screenplay and helped his own original script inestimably by adding the now-classic opening monologue delivered by the awesome Alec Baldwin to set up the competition that drives the action. And the director, James Foley, took Mamet’s script and gave it cinematic life by moving the characters beautifully around and about the two-bit Chicago neighborhood near the low-rent office filled with the play’s crew of real-estate shysters.
Denzel Washington set himself a nearly insuperable challenge in attempting to make a memorable movie out of Fences. His impulse was admirable and the movie is not a failure. But it’s not really a success, either.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
