Review of Fences (2016) by Axet — 06 Jan 2017

Denzel Washington is a great actor and one of the biggest movie stars, and he is the only thing about this that makes it watchable. It's a bore. A snooze. Nothing new. Yet it's well acted across the board, the photography is simple and effective, and the music is mostly a spare light piano which generally is my favorite kind of score for adult dramas. It does have a few intense moments of dramatic humanity, with some nice directorial flourishes.

The source of this movie is a stage play, and with that comes drastic limitation unless it is adapted with great creative latitude. It stays pretty much a straight adaptation carrying along all the wall to wall nearly non-stop stagey affected dialogue which may be good for actors to showcase their talents but is wearing and somewhat unnaturalistic to the audience. The question must be asked: What does this little domestic story do on the big screen that couldn't be done on the small on say the Hallmark Channel? The answer is nothing really besides feature Denzel's face.

Funny little detail is I thought his friend at the beginning of the film was 'white' and not until the end of the movie did I suddenly realize he's 'black' and just has light skin, which points to the absurdity of emphasizing race in general though this has nothing to do with the movie itself.