“The Piano Lesson” (2024) is a family affair on screen and behind the camera. This film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1987 play, the fourth play in Wilson’s “The Pittsburgh Cycle.” It starts on July 4, 1911 in Sunflower, Mississippi, when the Charles’ brothers decide to steal an ornately carved piano from James Sutter (Jay Peterson), a descendant of the person who enslaved their family, with deadly consequences for a group of men regardless of their involvement in the robbery, who became known as the vengeful Ghosts of the Yellow Dog. Twenty-five years later, Boy Willie (John David Washington), a witness and descendant of one of the Charles brothers, travels to Pittsburgh to sell watermelons with his friend, the tall and not too swift Lymon (Ray Fisher), who plans to stay. They bring back tall tales of the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog finally killing Sutter. Boy Willie wants to reclaim the piano from his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), who lives with their uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), and her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), but Sutter’s ghost seems to have reappeared to do the same. Who does the piano belong to?
Boy Willie is kind of an annoying character though sympathetic because of his history. He wants to buy Sutter’s land but does not have enough money to do it. He is a big talker who waltzes into someone else’s house to take something from them, disregards his sister’s wishes and bosses everyone around. John David, the eldest of Pauletta and Denzel Washington’s children, never quite succeeds into making his character likeable and is the weakest actor in an otherwise excellent ensemble. Editor Leslie Jones and director and cowriter Malcolm Washington, a twin and the youngest, do the heavy lifting by fleshing out his thoughts, showing his memories and invoking the lyrical montage homage to Terrence Malick to illustrate the relationship between the people and the land. Without it, Washington makes Boy Willie sound like a scam artist, not an earnest sharecropper who finally wants to claim the land that he and his ancestors worked without reward for generations. Though John David has his dad’s voice (Denzel is a producer along with his daughter, Katia), it feels like John David is acting, and he mistakes volume for the bone deep performances that his colleagues display that make them become the role.
Deadwyler is the real star of “The Piano Lesson,” which is not a surprise after she was the best woman actor in 2022 playing Mamie Till-Mobley in “Till” (2022), but is remarkable considering that she is starring alongside Jackson. With the exception of the scenes shared with Deadwyler, Jackson is a notable scene stealer, does not rest on his laurels and strikes new ground. Let’s hope that John David was taking notes. While she delivers lines perfectly for every scene, it could be a silent film with her in front of the camera whether she is just watching others, moving from one room to another or just taking a bath. As Berniece, she is a woman who cannot have anything: sleep, a bath, peace. It is a real testament to Deadwyler’s performance that when Berniece starts seeing ghosts, she still seems credible. Her position in this family is infuriating. Everyone wants something from her without offering anything in return except Doaker, who also does nothing to protect her peace except some feeble verbal intervention when the siblings bicker. With Fisher matching Deadwyler’s excellence, sensitivity and nuance, only a brief exchange with Lymon permits Berniece to show a gentler side when others are not besieging her.
Boy Willie is only the latest person interested in the piano. Aspiring pastor, Avery (Corey Hawkins), is courting her and tried to get her to sell the piano to get a church. Hawkins has a hard role to play. His character is not a charlatan and sincere, but he is also lacking the fortitude to make him a suitable equal for Berniece or to pursue his vocation. Every man has a dream and expects a woman to fulfill it if they nag enough, but Berniece is strong though filled with fear of the unknown, still grieving the loss of her first love and unable to forget her mother’s legacy of sorrow over what the family lost to get the piano. She will never let it go, but she also refuses to play it.
Boy Willie redeems himself because he is eager to pass on the story behind the piano’s intricate carvings to the next generation and encourages his niece to play it. By bringing Lymon, he also injects life into the house, and there is a great musical sequence when Doaker, Lymon, Boy Willie and the eldest uncle, Wining Boy, one of the original three brothers who stole the piano, sing together, but that act of generational unity soon leaves them isolated and shivering at their individual horrible memories of their birthplace that treated them inhumanely.
If a moviegoer is unfamiliar with “The Piano Lesson,” the story can feel as if it is all over the place but go into it expecting that the supernatural aspect ties together everything. The story is more than magical realism. It is a slow burn ghost story about spiritual warfare, but not between God versus the devil. Ancestors started the battle while they were living. In death, at least there are no structural and systematic thumbs on justice’s scale to give an advantage to one side. The piano is symbolic of the family’s soul. An object can become haunted if a spirit is attached to it either through blood shed or it was so closely associated with a person when they were alive. Wilson predated the CW television series “Supernatural,” and the concept of spiritual attachment to an object is an old one albeit not widely known. If the ancient Egyptian pharaohs wanted the people whom they enslaved to continue to serve them in the afterlife, why wouldn’t a descendant of antebellum times feel the same way. Beyond that, because this piano’s creation had two intents: to please the Sutters versus to memorialize an enslaved, separated family, it makes sense that the same struggle for control and ensuing violence keeps repeating itself in the future even though the Charles’ family understands the nuance of the object’s history and are not violent people.
It is also an American story with a Black family as the every family in a struggle about values. Every member of the Charles family has a problem with reconciling with the past and finding a way to move on. While it is insulting to reduce Boy Willie’s desire to own the land that in spirit, is the Charles’ property just like the piano, it is also a capitalist story where money is somehow supposed to make him whole, but to do so, he has to perform an act of violence and almost blood sacrifice. He understands that if he sells it, it is as if he is selling his family back into slavery and aligned with the Sutters. Berniece is just as blocked and understands that she unfairly blames her personal losses on her brother and Lymon when it is bigger than that, a generational suffering which her mother and countless others endured. It is more challenging to find a way to move on from that in a transcendent way, but it is also the solution of healing the original sin of American’s founding.
Avery suggests a traditional Biblical route, which gets the Charles family on the right path, but is not the solution. If a movie can end on a strong note, then it is easier to forget all the flaws leading up to it. “The Piano Lesson” does so in a way that feels like a brief homage to “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), with brief cameos from mom Pauletta Washington and Malcolm’s twin sister, Olivia.
