The Piano Lesson

This is based on August Wilson's play and you'll never be in any doubt it came from the stage. The style of presentation and the construction of the story is entirely theatrical and that didn't really work so well for me on a big screen. It's all about a piano. "Boy Wille" (John David Washington) thinks that by selling it, they could improve their lot. Sister "Berniece" (Danielle Deadwyler) thinks over her dead body. That sentiment might actually prove closer to the truth than anyone wants, though, as the story develops and it becomes clear that this beautifully carved piano has no intentions of moving anywhere - and that it comes with quite an haunting provenance. Both characters see this instrument as an integral part of their past - a past peppered with brutality, slavery and hard labour, but can they reconcile any role it has in their future. Samuel L. Jackson features sparingly as family patriarch "Doaker" but barely imprints himself on the story (I think it'd have preferred Colman Domingo), Corey Hawkins plays the preacher "Avery" as if he were trying to be Eddie Murphy and the rest of it proceeds in a disappointingly soapy style as it mixes all the usual family melodrama with a ghastly, violent history and the tiniest elements from a horror movie towards the end. It does look good, but there's very little pace to the whole thing, there's far too much dialogue for a cinema feature and though the camerawork does sometimes give us an intensity as it mingles amongst the "Charles" family, for the most part this is enter stage left, exit stage right sort of stuff that ought to have stayed on it's original medium.