The Piano Lesson: Samuel L Jackson is quietly magnificent in this fitful August Wilson drama

This film can’t quite pay off as horror, but it borrows the trappings of an exorcism flick to force a family crisis to a head

3/5
The Piano Lesson is in every sense a teachable affair. Soon enough, school libraries will stock it next to the films of Fences (2016) and of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), as another example of an August Wilson play reverently adapted, with juicy parts for several of the cast.
This fourth piece in Wilson’s ten-strong “Pittsburgh Cycle” has many of the classic ingredients: a midcentury African-American family with buried grievances, resentments about money and status, neighbours who drop in and hit the bottle hard.
It’s easy to spot the second that the play proper starts in Malcolm Washington’s adaptation, co-written by Mudbound scenarist Virgin Williams and produced by Washington père, Denzel. It’s with a rap on the door in the middle of the night, in 1936 Pittsburgh, as sneaky gadabout Boy Willie (yet another Washington, John David) pitches up at the house of his uncle Doaker (Samuel L Jackson, getting little peace from here on in) and starts loudly announcing his intentions to cart off the piano inside.
This is a family heirloom with very special resonance, especially to Willie’s widowed sister Berniece (Till’s powerhouse, Danielle Deadwyler), who grew up playing it, and won’t hear of it being sold. There are carvings all over it representing long-lost family members. In flashbacks, we see the father of these two, Boy Charles (Stephan James) in the moment when he requisitioned it from a slave owner called Sutter in 1911, bringing down lethal punishment from a firebrand-wielding mob of white oppressors.
Preserving Wilson’s dramatic structure means relaying this story in odd fits and starts, with some enervating interruptions, as Willie’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher, ingratiating but too musclebound for his role) and another uncle, the sozzled widower Wining Boy (Michael Potts) grab the spotlight, too. Jackson inhabits the film beautifully, if more gently: in the role of peacemaker and sounding board, he’s the least pushy of all these performers, but finds the music in Wilson’s words and wastes none of it.
The sibling spats are the real meat. Deadwyler, socking Berniece over to us, electrifies in two long scenes – one brutally revealing that she blames Willie for the death of her husband, another fending off the unbearable pressure of a preacher (Corey Hawkins) to start a new life with him, when she simply isn’t ready.
Meanwhile, ghosts from a traumatic Mississippi childhood make themselves known to all who go upstairs – creaky stage hauntings literalised here with actual spectres stepping from the shadows.
The Piano Lesson can’t quite pay off as horror, but it borrows the trappings of an exorcism flick to force this family crisis to a head. Whether this entirely dovetails with the film’s strong suit – as an acting showcase – may leave you in two minds; it feels like a tussle with staginess more than it does a genuine battle with the spirit world. And staginess still wins.
In cinemas from Nov 8; streaming on Netflix from Nov 22