News of the World a Western for Adults

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NEWS OF THE WORLD (2016)

Paulette Jiles

William Morrow, 209 pages

★★★★

One of the virtues of being a voracious reader is that you occasionally stumble onto something you'd not normally consume and find it a delectable treat. That was exactly my experience with News of the World.

It's a (sort of) Western, a genre I normally avoid—mostly because too many of them are Zane Grey wannabes and I read Grey (and Wister, L'Amour, etc.) when I was a kid. News of the World is different in content and sensibility. It takes place in Texas five years after the end of the Civil War—the fighting part of that is. Texas was quite different in the 1870s than it is today. Places like Dallas, Kerrville, Llano, and San Antonio were cowtowns—and rough ones to boot. Fort Worth was still a fort, a needed one as Kiowa, Comanche, and several other tribes roamed freely and raided frequently. Shall we say, though, that it was a toss-up as to who was more "savage," the unconquered Natives or the floozies, con artists, and drunken, gun-toting white lowlifes that populated not-yet "civilized" towns.

Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd is the unconventional hero of News of the World. At age 71, Kidd is both bone- and world-weary. As a boy he witnessed the War of 1812, and he participated in Mexican and Civil conflicts. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, but with little enthusiasm. He is sick of violence and has little time for Reconstruction politics and unbowed racists and Democrats lamenting the end of slavery. His priorities are more immediate. Kidd misses his late wife, a rich Mexican woman whose passing left him with estranged adult children and no bankroll. Kidd ekes out a modest living as a reader; for tens cents a head, audiences listen to Kidd read from papers from around the nation and the world. Call it the 19^th century's approximation of the World Wide Web. Even if you were literate, most people in rural Texas would have never laid hands or eyes on papers from back East or abroad.

Against his better judgment, Kidd agrees to take on a daunting task: a 400-mile ride from Wichita Falls to Castroville, Texas, to return ten-year-old Johanna Leonberger to her surviving relatives. Don't imagine a Rooster Cogburn type of story; the Kiowa killed Johanna's German immigrant parents when she was six, and she was raised Kiowa. Johanna has forgotten both German and English, has adopted Indian culture, and her Kiowa family is the only one she remembers. Kidd doubts he can complete the journey, but he needs the $50 (in gold) reward.

That trek makes Jiles' story much better than your average paint-by-the-numbers Western. To be sure, there is plenty of treachery, action, and danger, but the tale is really about the relationship between Kidd and Johanna. Captain Kidd is genteel and erudite like his piratical namesake, but how does one communicate across language, culture, and trust barriers? Jiles populates the back scenery with assorted ex-slaves, desperadoes, legitimate do-gooders, and some whose quality of mercy is strained. Jiles also lets us inside Johanna's Kiowa brain to give us three under-served points of view: that of a female, a child, and a Native American. She brings it all home in a crisp 209 pages that you'll turn faster than the Captain flips newspaper pages. Give this one a chance, even if you can't imagine you'd enjoy a Western.

Rob Weir

Nikki Lane, Leslie Tom, Amy Stroup, Ani-DiFranco: Let the Women Sing Out

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This review roundup features four female vocalists not afraid to explore their artistic borders. 

If you like sassy women airing it out in front of a kick-ass band, you can't find many better than Nikki Lane. One of the cooler things about Lane is that she doesn't possess a naturally big voice. She could have easily opted for the whispery breathless little girl sounds that are so in vogue these days. Instead she boldly cuts loose, as if she were a mash of Loretta Lynn, Tom Petty, and Wanda Jackson. Her latest record is titled Highway Queen. The title track is a compelling mix of outlaw country, badass rock, muscular singing, and soul-stirring electric guitar. This is a continuation of a formula she developed on her previous release All or Nothin' (New West Records) that was released in 2014 and is one my favorite outlaw country/Americana records. It featured full-tilt energy, style hopping, and attitude galore. Check out the sexy organ and Lane's bump-and-grind vocals on the title track of that one. Or maybe you'd prefer her girl-group-meets-The Bangles "I Don't Care," the surf guitar of "Seein' Double," the honky-tonk defiance of "Man Up," or the spontaneous living room feel of the first section of "Love's on Fire." Want to dance with anger? Check out "Sleep with a Stranger."  I've not yet heard all of Highway Queen, but rate All or Nothin' ★★★★ ½

Leslie Tom uses the hashtag "UnapologeticallyCountry" and that sums her to a tee. Her recent EP Leslie Tom (Coastal Records) is a throwback to when female country music was really big voices singing about love, heartaches, and family. There are several honky-tonk selections that immediately put one in mind of Patsy Cline, including a cover of one of Cline's signature songs, "Leavin' On My Mind." Tom does it as if it were a country/café torch song. Hers is indeed a big voice and she's not afraid to air it. What I really liked was that Tom steers clear of processed sheen. She even gets a little bit corny on "Hank You VeryMuch," a tribute in which she skillfully interweaves Hank Williams song titles. And if you want to wallow in a roadhouse weepie, check out "Breakin' My Own Heart," a twangy 1950's throwback featuring country legends Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano and Lloyd Green on pedal steel. Later, there's a love song duet with Kevin Moon; a patriotic tribute to her grandfather, a World War II vet; and; and a tongue-in-cheek reflection on motherhood, "Hardest Thing I'll Ever Do." You don't get much more unapologetically country than a line like: "You're a Goldilocks with your daddy's eyes/You're a ketchup smile with greasy French fries."  ★★★★

Amy Stroup has enjoyed commercial success—literally; some of her work has made its way into advertisements, as well as movies and TV shows such as "Pretty Little Liars." She's based in Nashville, also fronts the indie band Sugar and the Hi-Lows, and some have called her an alt.country performer. Hmmm… Based on Tunnel, I'd say she's stretched that label to the breaking point. Picture Enya with a younger-sounding voice and more ventures into the pop realm. Mix with the dance hall pulsing tones and loops of someone like Ariana Grande or Debbie Gibson, and send all the vocals through an echo chamber. That's what Tunnel is like. "Dark Runs Out" is very Enyaesque with its soupy electronics and swooshing swells; and the vocals in "We Finally Found Out" literally linger in the background of an electro-keyboard drone that slide in with choral backup singers. We catch that similar quality of a song (not quite) breaking through from the mist in "Curious Heart." Don't hold out for a lot of lyrical insight from this album, as most of the arrangements are too hazy, thick, and echoey for us to ponder poetry. The closest Stroup gets to straight-on songs come in the piano/guitar/snare opening of "Hold What you Can" or the pop vibes of "Far From yesterday," but both of these also get an aural bath at some point. The most surprisingly track is "Falling," with its surf guitar and late 1950s feel. It's hard to argue with Stroup's success, though I'm less willing to call Tunnel any sort of artistic triumph. It has its moments, but overall it feels over-produced and under-realized. ★★

When you put yourself on he griddle as often as Ani DiFranco does, you better be able to take the heat. She shocked LGBT fans when she married a man and had two kids. She pissed off hipsters when she did some projects with trad folkies, and took grief from self-styled revolutionaries for going to a songwriters' retreat at a luxury resort that was once a slave plantation. Has Ani sold out? Hell no! Her Play God EP lays to rest that silly notion by reprising some of her rebellious favorites. The title track—included as both a studio and a live take—is a soul- and funk-influenced no-holds-barred defense of reproductive freedom: My right to choose/You don't get to play God, man/I do…. "Subdivision" is an in-your-face smack-down of white privilege: White people are so scared of black people/They bulldoze out to the country/And put up houses on little loop-de-loop streets/And while America gets its heart cut right out of its chest/The Berlin Wall runs down Main Street. The only heat DiFranco deserves is that her songs are sometimes so political that her famed staccato guitar style and changing rhythms are necessary to cover lyrics that don't scan well. DiFranco's voice has matured to something akin to a huskier version of Melissa Ferrick and this EP is less folky and more soulful. Don't like that? DiFranco's "All This" is her refuse-to-compromise rejoinder. ★★★ ½

Rob Weir

Why Spring MLB Games Matter (Sort of): And Other Baseball Thoughts

Or do they count more than we imagine?

I usually do a preliminary evaluation of the Major League Baseball season sometime around the All-Star break. This year, though, I want to turn my attention to other matters, including the old adage that spring training games don’t matter at all and those in April and May hardly matter. These are, at best, half truths.

Confession time: I ignored the New York Yankees impressive spring training record and picked them to finish last in the American League East. They currently sit atop it. I still don’t think the season will end that way, but simple math makes my last place prediction unlikely. By the end of May, the Yankees had already won 30 games and unless they fall apart completely, they will put to rest the notion that early games don’t matter. There are 112 games left to play. Tons of baseball, right? Yes and no. To finish the season with a winning record, the Yankees can go a paltry 52-60 (.464). Tweak this slightly. If the Yankees play .500 ball (56-56) they will finish with 86 wins, possibly good enough to get into the postseason.

The Astros, at a blistering 38-16, would have to implode not to make the postseason, but let's consider the Cubs, last year’s World Series champs. At the end of May they were a mediocre 25-27. I still think they will win the weak NL Central, but there’s almost no chance of them duplicating last year’s 103 wins. They’d have to go 78-32 to do so, a stunning .709 pace. None of these numbers mean that the Yankees or Astros will go to World Series or that the Cubs won’t, but they are provocative.

Sheath Your Sabermetrics:

The fast start of the Yankees and the unexpectedly decent ones of the Twins, Brewers, and Rockies fuel my saber-skepticism. I don’t reject all sabermetric analysis, but there sure is a lot of junk science lurking among the useful stuff. The two worst categories are UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating) and WAR (Wins Above Replacement value). UZR only works if every batted ball goes consistently into apportioned zones, each chance is of equal difficulty, and all external variables are taken into account (field conditions, shifts, weather, the quality of the pitchers, etc.). Impossible. But nothing is as dumb as WAR, a form of voodoo math that purports to measure how many wins or losses an existing player brings to the team in comparison to a theoretical replacement player. A what!?

Those who actually watch baseball instead of spinning algorithms know that among the game’s beauties is its ability to defy logic. Show me the WAR cipher who, in 2016, said that if the Yankees benched Brian McCann—a player most WARmongers like way better than I—that Gary Sanchez would rise from the minors and hit 20 homeruns in 53 games. That was, of course, a statistical fluke. This year he has four after 52 games and that’s my point: you can’t come up with foolproof models for a sport with this many variables. That’s why unexpected players end up as heroes in situations where the models say they should fail.

By the way, that I still think win/loss records matter for pitchers. There are lots of guys with “great stuff” and great stats who can’t seem to miss bats in crucial situations. Witness this year's Cubs' starters (which I predicted, by the way).

On the Field:

Although the Yankees probably won’t bring up the rear as I predicted, I’m not seeing enough pitching to avoid a tumble down the standings. Mashiro Tanaka’s agent is the only reason Tanaka isn’t undergoing Tommy John surgery; it would ruin his chance to use his opt out clause and squeeze a few more bucks out of some sucker. The Yankees have ridden big bats and a great bullpen thus far. The bats are likely to cool at some point and the pen is already exhausted from a subpar five innings and out starting staff.

I will say, though, that it would delight me if the Yankees ragtag pitchers took them further than the Red Sox dream staff of Sale, Price, Porcello, Pomeranz, et. al. Don’t think it will happen, but I’d love to see the sabermetrics crowd try to explain that one.

I’m enough of a Stathead to think Ervin Santana’s 7-2 start is a fluke. Bet the Twins can’t wait to get a haul for him before his past catches up with him. I’ll bet they also wish they could find a taker for Brian Buxton, the new poster child for the Can’t-Miss-But-Did prize. I’m afraid I still don’t believe in the Twins—not yet, anyhow. I might have to rethink the Diamondbacks, though. As for the Rockies, who the hell knows in that ballpark?

I didn’t think the Phillies would be good, but I thought they’d be better. I also thought the Mets would be good enough to win, but I sure didn’t foresee most of their pitching staff succumbing to injuries. The Giants have the same problem. Lousy April-May records will make it hard for either to make up ground. Pittsburgh sure has looked bad as well. Lucky for the Bucs they are in that weak NL Central.

Of course, just about anything could happen. Remember how the Jays went from hopeless to first two years ago with an August/September burst? Or how the Braves and Red Sox fell off the cliff in 2011? But I'm not sending in advance orders for Twins/Rockies World Series tix.  

 Rob Weir

Eagle Huntress is Nest-Bound

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS (2016)

Directed by Otto Bell

Sony Pictures Classics, 87 minutes, English subtitles, G (animals harmed)

★

The Eagle Huntress played at my local cinema for so long I finally decided to see what all the fuss was about. Here’s your answer: Not much. The Oscars wisely withheld a Best Documentary nomination for this contrivance, and I don’t generally use the words “Oscars” and “wisely” in the same non-ironic sentence. The Eagle Huntress depressed me—not the subject matter, but the thought that audiences are so starved for something honeyed that they will settle for watered-down NutraSweet.

The film follows Aisholpan Nurgaiv’s quest to become a champion eagle handler. Aisholpan comes from twelve-generations of respected eagle hunters, but faces a challenge: this young Kazakh is a girl seeking to make her mark in a sport hitherto reserved for males. Alas, this is only a perseverance tale for young girls for the terminally Politically Correct crowd. Aisholpan’s major obstacle isn’t gender—it’s getting up to snuff. Her father, Rys, has allowed her to handle eagles since she was tiny, is 100% supportive of her goal, and aids her at every step. And, because his family is associated with a line of exalted eagle executors, those who would cleave to patriarchal tradition can only sneer and tut-tut Aisholpan’s boldness. I must admit that they look quite regal doing so in their colorful Kazakh robes, structurally impressive hats, and imposing moustaches, but we already know they can’t stop her, so pull the plug on that piece of potential drama. Ditto Aisholpan’s ascent into an eagle aerie to kidnap a three-month-old eagle. We see her belay down a rock face with Rys playing out the rope, but we also know she won’t fall or be mauled by a PO’d Golden Eagle Mama because this is a G-rated film for heaven’s sake.

Director Otto Bell swears that he didn’t stage any of the dialogue or scenes, but it sure plays that way. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because I don’t want to add “lousy script writer” to his job description. Imagine Werner Herzog in one of his worst bouts of New Age excess. Sprinkle with dad/daughter bonding. Knead into bland Disney-like dough. Add more filler than the last five pages of a paper from a panicked sophomore sixty minutes from deadline. Sound appetizing? Shots of the Mongolian steppes and craggy snow-covered mountains are breath-taking in their beauty, but they are often National Geographic discursion merely masquerading as back story to Aisholpan’s appearance before bemused co-contestants and skeptical judges.

The Eagle Huntress is essentially the Westminster Dog Show for eagles and handlers in exotic costumes. Aisholpan competes at a festival in a town several days’ horse ride from where her semi-nomadic herding family is camped. Over the course of three days she has to demonstrate her prowess in making her eagle come to her (in several situations), grab onto bait, gracefully soar onto her arm, and simulate various hunting maneuvers. Although it’s unclear if this is part of the competition or a tribal confirmation of her status, Aisholpan and her father also set off for snowy high elevation to meet the ultimate challenge of having her eagle kill a fox. For the squeamish, rabbits and sheep don’t fare very well in the film either.   

Aisholpan is fearless and charming and the scenery is awe-inspiring, but overall The Eagle Huntress is turgid, dull, and fake-feeling. Its 87-minute length could have been pared to twenty and lost nothing in the telling. Call this one as over-sold as its Sia pop song theme: “You Can Do Anything.” All that’s lacking for the total force-fed feel-good package is a troupe of dancing puppets.

Rob Weir   

May 2017 Album of the Month: I Draw Slow

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I DRAW SLOW

Turn Your Face to the Sun

Compass Records

Here's a recording in the tradition of Nickel Creek, Alison Krauss, and Ryan Adams. Who knew that some of the very best purveyors of North Carolinian bluegrass are Irish? I Draw Slow is built around the brother/sister collaboration of Dubliners Dave (guitar/vocals) and Louise Holden (vocals), and is rounded out by Adrian Hart (fiddle), Colin Derham (clawhammer banjo), and Konrad Liddy (double bass). The Holdens excel at close harmony singing, but Louise is a treasure in her own right—she of the strong, clear voice tinged with just the right amount of husk.

I do not exaggerate when I say that this is music that makes you wonder if the Wicklow Mountains were magically transported to the suburbs of Asheville. Like the best bluegrass/trad folk bands, I Draw Slow mixes darkness and light, though they list a bit more to the former. What's really cool is that they take you to dark places with a smile on your lips. The album's title comes from a line in the opening track, "Maria," in which Dave sings: Turn back Marie, don't follow me/Maria, turn your face to the sun/Oh my Maria/Oh, if you knew what I had done. This is your classic bluegrass bad man tale, complete with its Will I always be alone lamentation. Generally, though, this band makes you think by sneaking up on you. There is, for example, "Don't Wake the Children," a quiet song with a melody more gorgeous than a week full of power ballads. It's so pretty you'd be excused for thinking it a lullaby, though it's really about the gnawing worry that life is slipping away without measure or reckoning: Is this the midway or the end?/Hands over your heart, do you sleep or just pretend?/I'd like to reach across the stone/Each wonderful day that we are flesh as well as bone/So don't wake the children, don't wake the children just yet. And there's "Apocalypso," a love song, but of the Devil take the hind parts variety. Louise Holden is absolutely stunning on this one (and every other track as well)—ethereal of voice, yet full of verve and energy at the same time. Another stellar track is "My Portion," which is about the journey of addicts of all varieties, so I guess that covers all of us. It includes the wonderful line: Oh, love you give what I need/You take like a one-armed bandit.

If you'd prefer lyrics a bit less cryptic, try "Twin Sisters," (at 4:40) another bluegrass staple: the love-me-or-I'll-die high-energy song (What'' I do if I can't have you), framed by deliberately raw scratch fiddle. Or perhaps the mountain wedding song "Same Old Dress Will Do," or the more country-laced, flat-picked "Garage Flowers," a duet-commit-or-leave song: Hey honey, I was wondering where you've been/Because if you don't ring the bell then you won't get in/I'm not getting any younger waiting home alone for you/If you're just gonna leave these garage flowers and push on through.

If you listen carefully you'll hear some Irish references, but mainly you'll marvel over how well I Draw Slow has mastered American folk and bluegrass. I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised; after all, scores of Yanks play Irish music. A lot of them can but dream of mastering the songs of Erin with the mastery in which these five sons and daughters of the Auld Sod have carved out their own little piece of Appalachia.

Rob Weir

Postscript: Some might have heard of I Draw Slow from their song "Valentine," which appeared in a Game of Thrones episode. 

Anything is Possible Too Saccharine

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ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE (2017)

Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 254 pages

★★

When Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in2009 for Olive Kitteridge I thought I'd be reading her forever. Now I think I may have been hasty. Nothing she since done matches the acerbic tone of Olive Kitteridge, nor have her subsequent female characters possessed a fraction of Olive's resolve and grit. Strout seems to be becoming a "women's" writer. I have trouble with exclusivity of all sorts: women's music, black entertainment, gay film, men's magazines, identity-segregated college dorms …. I had hoped we had moved beyond 1970s conscious-raising tactics. But that's another matter. Contemporary women's literature—and its tacky younger cousin, chick lit—crosses the border between sentiment and sentimentality and often descends into mawkishness and nostrums. Worse, characters too often wallow in victimhood. I could hardly stomach the whininess and passivity of the titular character in Strout's previous work, My Name is Lucy Barton. Lucy's ultimate "triumph" of settling in New York and becoming a writer seems more accidental than anything she accomplished on her own. (Heaven save us from another damn novel where the protagonist becomes a successful novelist. That's fiction within fiction as only handful of authors in the entire country sustain themselves by writing alone.)

As much it grieves me to say it, the only people I know who liked Lucy Barton were women, as were nearly all of the reviewers.  Thus far the same breakdown is true for Anything is Possible. It is a quirky sequel to Lucy Barton melded to an Illinois version of Spoon River Anthology—nine tales involving people and communities mentioned in Lucy Barton. Barton appears in just one of the chapters, a story of her first post-success visit home. In it, Barton is shocked to find that a relative has fallen upon hard times and outwardly resents her success. Lucy dispenses fairy-like kindness and Florence Nightingale charity, though one wonders how someone who has been living in New York could be so surprised to find people living on the margins. Lucy haunts all nine tales—as the one who escaped, a role model, an idle thought, someone to begrudge, or an unsolved mystery. Strout's small town life (mostly the fictional Amgash) has virtues and challenges, but her characters usually experience joy or sorrow privately. I liked that exterior/interior touch. I also admired Strout's willingness to confront ugly things: illness, sexual predators, unhappiness… though I have issues with how she resolves such things. Each chapter is semi-discrete, which makes the book a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection. As in (too) many such efforts, the individual tales range from deeply poignant to "Who cares?" For me, there were too many of the latter.

I also find Strout's work increasingly sentimental and sneakily preachy. I've no objection to interjecting Christian themes into literature, but I am leery of using them as magical thinking—something often experienced by the characters in this book. I get the notion that faith perhaps plays a bigger role in the Midwest than in other regions of the country, but I also suspect we are hearing Strout's views imposed upon her characters in ways that are inconsistent and too convenient. Her opening story, "The Sign," deals with an elderly man whose farm goes up in smoke. Sorry, but I simply find it hard to believe that his first thought was of God's grace as he watches his house disappear beneath the flames. I have no doubt that individuals come to see loss as a blessing, but it's hard for me to get past my impression that this scene is an implausible contrivance and an exercise in overwriting. Overall, I enjoyed about a third of the book, but found the rest either saccharine or sententious.

I am open to the possibility that mine is a too-male interpretation. I invite comment from other readers and am willing to take my lumps. My critics might be right, but either way, I think I'm done with Elizabeth Strout—unless she has another Olive in her writing bowl.

Rob Weir  

Fences a Powerful Drama

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FENCES (2016)

Directed by Denzel Washington

Paramount, 139 minutes, PG-13

★★★★

Fences is a powerful drama sparked by two towering performances, those of Denzel Washington as Troy Maxson and Viola Davis as his wife, Rose. It is based on August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name and Mr. Wilson completed the screenplay before his death in 2005. Both the play and film have been hailed for their frank discussions of race, but Fences, if you will, goes well beyond the boundaries of race. It is also about patriarchy, psychological abuse, internalized anger, ageing, fidelity, and fealty. If, like me, you missed it at the theater, rest assured that it works very well on video because it is essentially a filmed play.

Fences is set in 1950s Pittsburgh and centers on Troy Maxson, who is equal parts proud and beaten down. Troy was a baseball star in the Negro Leagues, but was past his prime by the time Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color barrier. Troy, however, sees racism, not age, as the reason he never got a chance to play, a self-deception fueled by the fact that life hasn’t dealt him the best of hands. He fled from an abusive father when he was just 14; has an older musician son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), from a relationship that ended long ago; is brother to the  harmless but mentally ill Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson); and works as a garbage man. About all he has going for him is his friendship with coworker Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson), and his eighteen-year marriage to Rose, with whom he has another son, Cory (Jovan Adepo).

Troy’s is a life of over-compensation in which he lies to himself so he doesn’t have to face the fact that he is repeating the sins of his own father and adding a few of his own. His relationship with Bono is essentially that of celebrity and yes-man sycophant; he constantly derides Lyons, whom he sees—with some justification—as a no-account freeloader; brags at the local bar; and treats Cory more like a lowly vassal than a son. Through it all, Rose is the better angel who can free his emotions, buried desires, and sense of humor. She’s also the only one who isn’t afraid of him, calls him out, and has the strength to push him aside when he betrays her. 

Deep inside, Troy fears he is as psychologically scarred as his war-damaged brother, but without Gabriel’s sweet nature. Troy holds imaginary wrestling matches with Death and often takes bat to a bolted-through baseball hanging from a backyard tree, a symbol of both his derailed dreams and what he suspects is a path poorly chosen. Yet Troy rides roughshod over Cory’s dream of playing college football—a compensatory fear that if Cory broke the Maxson pattern of futility his own failures would be magnified. Troy steadfastly refuses to see—as Rose constantly reminds him—that times have changed and that both his patriarchal privilege and the model of raising subservient children with scaled-down dreams are outmoded. Troy uses his successful battle to become Pittsburgh’s first black sanitation truck driver as an aspirational triumph, yet rides Cory as if he were a field-hand slave driver, and fails to see the possibilities within the civil rights dramas occurring beyond his unfinished backyard fence. Is that fence taking (or failing to take) shape to keep Troy’s demons in or out?   

This is powerful stuff, even if it is often a mash of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. (Wilson always denied having any secondary inspirations, a claim of which I am dubious.) Washington and Davis are absolutely riveting in their reprisals of roles played on Broadway. Those reprisals raise issues, though. How much should a movie depart from a play in content and in look to be more than a filmed stage performance? I was blown away by the performances, but nothing was added by making Fences into a movie. Aside from a few street scenes, the camerawork is static, the drama is confined to two rooms and a backyard, and play’s acts are faithfully duplicated. This is something of a problem for the final “act,” which telescopes to 1962 as the family gathers for Troy’s funeral. On screen, what we see and hear doesn’t make a lot of sense. The differences in media come into sharp focus here. Live theater builds audience emotions in ways that encourage the filling in of narrative blanks, but the extra distancing of the screen generally requires more explanation. As great as the performances are—and they are stupendous—should reprised stage roles filmed qualify for film acting awards? I don’t think so, but I do think you should see Fences if you haven’t already. You will witness actors at the height of their craft and ponder issues deep and dark. And the next time you need to explain the difference between acting and celebrity, or art versus mere entertainment, you’ll have ammunition.

Rob Weir