‘Fences’ Review: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis Take Center Stage

The stage-trained megastar played Wilson’s Troy Maxson — former ballplayer, ex-con and struggling Pittsburgh garbageman — in a celebrated 2010 revival, and he’s now taken the reins behind and in front of the camera for a film adaptation that amounts to a great actor’s dedicated stewardship of the late dramatist’s considerable gifts.

Simultaneously garrulous and caustic, Troy Maxson is a cash-conscious husband and father caught in a changing world: he came up in a segregated era that made him a Negro League sports star and self-reliant bulwark against racism and irresponsibility, and now he finds himself in a new, tentatively inclusive age that he doesn’t trust, especially when it pushes his teenage son Cory (Jovan Adepo, “The Leftovers”) to think he could land a football scholarship instead of a real job.

(That Troy aged out before major-league baseball integrated is an obvious source of acrimony.) When a fearful Cory openly questions whether his dad even likes him, Troy’s scary pushback is to make fatherhood sound like a job he’s got to do, nothing more.

Though it’s too far to call “Fences” plotless — there is the building of a metaphor-heavy fence — the movie mostly unfolds as a tour of Troy’s worldview as seen through interactions with those closest to him.

Besides Rose and Cory, there’s his oldest son Lyons (a suave yet vulnerable Russell Hornsby, “Grimm”), whose cash-borrowing visits trigger Troy’s scolding arrogance; Troy’s mentally damaged war veteran brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), about whom he feels immense guilt; and his work colleague and buddy Bono (the excellent Stephen Henderson, “Manchester by the Sea”), with whom Troy is his loosest, happiest self.

If we leave aside the mid-90s TV adaptation of “The Piano Lesson” (and we should), “Fences” is really the first chance to experience how Wilson’s soaring vernacular and offbeat narrative rhythms translate to features.

(Wilson, who worked on multiple drafts until his death in 2005, is the credited screenwriter.) Though “Fences” is arguably his most literal-minded play — it’s a ’50s work in not just its setting, but its Arthur Miller-esque unwinding of family tragedy – Wilson’s specialty was torrents of talk that opened up portals of history, experience and desire you could fall into.

Washington’s direction, meanwhile, hews to a respectful solidity of framing and editing that lets actors truly shine as scene partners, while still embodying enough of a widescreen-lensed sense of neighborhood time and place to feel lived-in.

[...] this amounts to quibbling when you have in “Fences” a movie that shows enough promise for the future of transposing Wilson’s work to this medium, and a pair of actors in Washington and Davis that turn passion, ache, helplessness and regret into the most shimmering of character duets.