A gripping allegorical séance sets The Piano Lesson free

Ghosts and demons plague the three film adaptations that Denzel Washington has produced of playwright August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle. They nip at the heels of Wilson’s characters. Their unshakable pasts and daunting legacies torment their presents and endanger their futures. In Fences, which Washington directed and starred in, they drive the failures of his contradiction-laden hardass Troy. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, they light a fire under trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman, in a final performance that serves as its own electric eulogy), fast burning out. In The Piano Lesson, the ghosts are as tangible as they’ve ever been, and the film barely containing them is as weathered and tense as any family in need of a séance.

Denzel Washington passes the Wilson baton to his sons for The Piano Lesson: Malcolm Washington makes his directorial debut, while John David Washington stars as the blustery Boy Willie Charles. Boy Willie blows into 1930s Pittsburgh with his dim pal Lymon (Ray Fisher), a truckful of watermelons, and an angle. The house he’s crashing at isn’t just the home of his uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson, who was the first to play Boy Willie on stage) and his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), but of an ornate family heirloom: a piano, literally haunted by its violent history.

The Charles family’s faces were carved into the piano’s panels, not so many decades ago, at the behest of the white family who owned them at the time. It was then reclaimed by Boy Willie’s father, who was murdered for his trouble. Much of this unfurls in stylish flashbacks (the best of which is the opening sequence, juxtaposed with the Fourth of July and intermittently lit by chrysanthemum fireworks) that make up The Piano Lesson’s rare scenes outside the Charles home.

The turmoil inside the home is driven by Boy Willie’s desire to sell the piano—which, by his account, is as much his as his sister’s—in order to buy up some land being sold by that same white family. Call it economic revenge, call it bootstrapping. The Piano Lesson calls it pride. Though Berniece finds it impossible to play the instrument any longer, and Doaker has washed his hands of the whole affair, the two respect its position in their home, in their family. It’s allegorical for the questions facing Black families in America: How do you participate in the systems that enslaved your ancestors and continue to oppress you? And what do you sacrifice through that participation? This ideas rage freely through Wilson’s words and some of Malcolm Washington’s stylistic choices.

Though John David Washington pitches his central capitalist at a loud, monotonous register, unsettling shallow-focus close-ups from cinematographer Mike Gioulakis lend him an edge of danger. The camera allows the sitting room to be as claustrophobic or cozy as needed, filled with dread or camaraderie. In one hectic, drunken sing-along of the work song “Berta, Berta,” both intermingle with the stomps and claps. Gioulakis also contributes some creative lighting set-ups that, in a few tightly edited sequences, add an otherworldly atmosphere to the warm chaos of the Charles house. 

When the ghost accompanying the piano, a specter of that white threat and the blood it has spilled, merely serves to underscore that mood, The Piano Lesson and its tragic baggage pulses. When it's the focal point, it threatens to topple the drama over the edge into sloppy horror—a Blumhouse boogeyman bursting into a Wilson play like Kramer into Jerry’s apartment.

Yet spirits inescapably run throughout the story. Vengeful ghosts, murderous ghosts, protective ghosts. The past walks among this family, and if they keep looking away from it, it will consume them. The older family members understand this. Jackson’s Doaker seems ashamed of his own impotence, while another uncle, Wining Boy (Michael Potts), finds solace in the bottle. Though John David Washington, Jackson, Fisher, and Potts all reprise their roles from the 2022 Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson, Potts and Jackson come out best in the film, finding all the nooks and crannies of their older, more jaded, more self-protective characters. Jackson stays small, but slices through the big feelings of Washington and Deadwyler. Potts plays a grand drunk, his body reeling around the room and his emotions slip-sliding from buddy-buddy schmoozing to despair. Corey Hawkins gives Deadwyler plenty to play off of as a softly smug preacher pursuing Berniece.

Together, the ensemble deftly rides Wilson’s torrents of dialogue. Malcolm Washington and his co-writer Virgil Williams’ additions are mostly flat—a nightclub outing wears on—while their trimmings tweak the story’s relationship to the supernatural, keeping the narrative more focused on the flesh-and-blood characters’ visions of the future. But they maintain the spirit of Wilson’s work, the family engaged in an increasingly heated debate about a larger way forward for Black Americans as the piano, and all its heavy magic, fades into furniture.

Director: Malcolm Washington

Writer: Malcolm Washington, Virgil Williams

Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Michael Potts, Erykah Badu, Skylar Aleece Smith, Danielle Deadwyler, Corey Hawkins

Release Date: November 8, 2024; November 22, 2024 (Netflix)