Whether consciously or not, the first question you have to answer in any movie is ‘do I like the central character? Do I really care what happens to him or her?’ When that central character is played by Denzel Washington (who, in this instance, is also the director) he has a head start, for who doesn’t love Denzel? To be straight up, however, I struggled with it a bit because I thought the protagonist, Troy Maxson, was a self-pitying, boorish pain in the arse. The sort of bloke who only has ears for his own stories and is not so much deaf to everybody else’s but idiomatically unaware that there are others that might even be heard. Set in Pittsburgh shortly after WWII, Maxson is a garbo who spends a lot of his time whingeing about the baseball career he missed out on. He drinks a lot of gin in the backyard with his work buddy Bono (Stephen Henderson) and occasionally Lyons (Russell Hornsby), the ne’er-do-well son from his first marriage. It’s in these scenes that August Wilson’s script (based on his own play) is most stagey and unconvincing. Maxson dominates the conversations (as the level in the bottle of gin varies disconcertingly) and although Washington and his support players deliver their lines with conviction and timing that is a little too precise, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are watching three blokes acting. Transferring a play from the boards to the screen can be a clunky business without the detachment of a contributor who is not as close to the work as its author. Notwithstanding the manufactured naturalism, it still comes back to Maxson. As a cloth-capped working-class hero with a chip on both shoulders, his blinkered self-absorption will not let him see the wrong that he does to his wife Rose (Viola Davis), who, for her part, pulls faces and has a frightful moment of heavy snot-crying (I wanted her to wipe it off her mouth much sooner than she did). And the last shot is pure guff.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
