‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: Stained By Blood, Haunted By History

The first time I watched The Piano Lesson was in a glorious, well-appointed screening room within Netflix’s main Hollywood campus. During a scene in which four men gather around a whiskey bottle in a Pittsburgh dining room and sing a prison work song from their shared and impossible to forget history in Mississippi, I was moved—literally. Every time the men stamped their boots on the floor, my seat shook so vigorously I wondered if we were having an earthquake. As the half-empty whiskey rattled on the table’s edge, I was convinced it was going to fall on my head.

When I watched it again this weekend in my house, streaming via the film’s permanent home on Netflix, the scene remained an impressive display of the intense power of playwright August Wilson’s vision and the immense skill of the actors, all four of whom were reprising roles they played in a 2022 Broadway revival.

But separated from the darkness of the theater and its booming sound system, the unforgettable moment lost a few degrees of its forcefulness and severity. That sense of history grabbing you by the throat was still there—it’s all but impossible to drain that quality out of any iteration of the plays in Wilson’s towering Pittsburgh Cycle—but the grip on your windpipe was not nearly as tight as it should be.

In adapting Wilson’s play, writers Virgil Williams and Malcolm Washington, who also directs, begin before the beginning, actualizing the stories and characters that have been summoned through words and the audience’s imagination in stage productions.

We meet for the first time Boy Charles (the magnetic Stephan James, from Babes and If Beale Street Could Talk) as he masterminds the great Independence Day piano heist of 1911, absconding with the instrument that had his family’s history carved into it by his grandfather, and which was traded for with members of his family. Shot in colorful shades of darkness by cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, it is a wonderfully evocative sequence and one of the film’s better moments of opening up Wilson’s marvelously contained play.

With Boy Charles a victim of racist violence, his brother Doaker (a wonderfully relaxed Samuel L. Jackson, whose history with the play dates back to its first production in 1987) now lives far from all that in Pittsburgh, with Charles’ daughter Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler) and her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith). The piano, stained with the blood and tears of their ancestors and perhaps cursed by the ghost of its previous owner, sits in the living room, untouched by all but Maretha, the only one unaware of its history.

Their urban idle is shattered by the arrival of Bernice’s live-wire younger brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), whose jalopy overflows with watermelons from back home. Willie’s plan: sell the watermelons, convince Bernice to sell the piano, then use the money to buy land that once belonged to the family who owned their ancestors. The problem? Bernice is as likely to sell that piano as she is to toss herself down a well, a fate that befell most of the men who murdered her father.

Washington gives an incendiary performance as a man demonically possessed by the idea that ownership of the land his family toiled over will solve all of life’s problems. The portrayal is perversely unburdened considering the pressure the actor was under; his father (Denzel) is the producer, his brother (Malcolm) is making his directorial debut, and the guy acting opposite him (Jackson) originated his role.

Danielle Deadwyler, mesmerizing in 2022’s Till, is even better as Bernice, the character haunted equally by her family’s past and its present. Evoking complicated emotions that her character hardly knows what to do with, Deadwyler speaks words that have been part of the American theatrical canon for nearly four decades as if she invented them on the spot.

The film concludes with additions that are less resonant than those that kick it off. When one character is forcefully flung across a hallway by a bloated specter that has blood leaking out of its eyes, you might wonder if you accidentally crossed streams with one of the countless horror films crowding the Netflix algorithm.

Just as some movies should always be seen in the theater, some ghosts are scariest when they exist solely in your head.