The Piano Lesson
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher
Writers: Virgil Williams, Malcolm Washington (From August Wilson’s play)
Director: Malcolm Washington
In theaters; streaming on Netflix November 22
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
A compelling mix of family and historical drama — with a touch of mysticism thrown in — The Piano Lesson explores the human compulsion to hold onto the past even while obsessing about the future. Based on one of August Wilson’s trilogy of dramas set in Black working-class Pittsburgh, the film retains the cast of an acclaimed stage production while setting its own course as a dynamic piece of filmmaking.
Arriving in 1936 Pittsburgh from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons they plan to sell to produce-hungry Pittsburghers, Boy Willie (John David Washington) and Lymon (Ray Fisher) — a pair of young farmworkers — come knocking on the door of Willie’s sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler).
Berniece is glad to see her brother — but things turn sour when she learns he’s in Pittsburgh not just to sell watermelons. He also wants her to sell a family heirloom: the upright piano that stands in her living room. Willie explains that he needs that money, plus the watermelon proceeds, to buy a patch of farm land back home. It’s a bold and brave thing for a Black sharecropper to do in the Depression era South, but Willie has big dreams. All he needs to make them come true is for his sister to go along with the plan.
But this is no ordinary upright. The piano’s exquisite relief wood carving was created by their enslaved grandfather, who modeled the figures after his wife and son. In an act of cruel irony, they had been shipped off to another plantation in exchange for this very same piano.
Years after the end of slavery, the father of Willie and Berniece returned to the former slavers’ home and stole the piano, deeming it to be rightfully his — and was killed on the orders of Sutter, the son of the former slaveholder. Understandably, Berniece will part with the piano no more than she’s willing to part with its tragic family history.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth between brother and sister regarding holding onto the past versus scrapping it to make way for a better future. Acting as a go-between is the family’s patriarch, Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson), owner of the Pittsburgh house, who understands Willie’s ambition but sympathizes with Berniece’s attachment to the piano, even though she refuses to so much as lift its keyboard cover for fear of releasing ghosts of the past.
Then again, there is apparently at least one piano-related ghost who is already on the loose: that of Sutter, the man who had Berniece and Willie’s father murdered. Sutter, it seems, mysteriously fell down his well years ago — helped, many believe, by someone bent on avenging the death of the man he’d ordered killed.
It’s hard to imagine a plot denser in both narrative and subtext than The Piano Lesson, and it’s a tribute to Wilson’s genius — and the steady direction of Malcolm Washington — that we never get lost in the weeds of sibling conflict, generational remembrance, national conscience, and eternal accountability.
Adapting a very talky play for the screen is no simple matter of building a set and positioning your camera. Aside from a white-knuckle opening sequence set during a post-Civil War Fourth of July celebration, nearly every frame of The Piano Lesson occurs in the parlor, kitchen, living room, and upstairs hallway of Doaker’s rowhouse. But the film never feels confined: Every performance crackles with authenticity and urgency. Once in a while, Washington lets his camera wander, circling a table or following a character from room to room, providing a pleasingly cinematic sense of intimacy. But to overdo that would make the audience all too aware of the camera’s presence. Washington wisely lets the power of the closeup and the wisdom of judicious editing convey Wilson’s drama seamlessly to the screen.
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