Fences (12A) FOUR STARS

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IT would be easy to throw accusations of staginess at Denzel Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. After all, the locations are limited to a handful and it’s all about the characters standing around talking.

But the power of Washington’s multi-Oscar nominated adaptation, as both director and star, is to play to the source material’s strengths as a fiercely intimate, all-or-nothing barrage of fiery exchanges.

Washington plays Troy Maxson, the patriarch of a working-class African American family in 1950s Pittsburgh who lives paycheque-to-paycheque working as a trash collector around the city.

Friday comes and Troy does what he usually does: brings home his pay, downs half a bottle of liquor and waxes lyrical with his friend Bono (Stephen Henderson) and wife Rose (Viola Davis) about how he knows it all (including death and the devil himself) while life slipped him by.

It’s a film about the past, not only how it shapes Troy and his family but how it continues to keep a stranglehold on him, simultaneously treasuring what he has and, perhaps selfishly, yearning for what could have been; he was once a baseball player on the cusp of success but who never quite made it, instead settling for a regular family life where he pays up on the responsibility he feels he unshakeably owes to them.

The very roof over his head was actually paid for by compensation money he received for taking care of his war-injured brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), a fact Troy seems too unwilling or too uncomfortable with to mention whenever he’s holding it over his family’s head as a privilege.

Troy finds it difficult to hold together his relationships with his two sons; he scoffs at his eldest, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), for being a musician rather than getting a steady job, while coming down hard on his youngest, Cory (Jovan Adepo) because of his affinity for playing high school football and desperation for his father to simply like him. “I ain’t got to like you,” he mocks.

Washington’s tensely immediate direction couples wonderfully with Wilson’s astonishing melody of believable, powerfully loaded dialogue delivered, in its finest and most searing moments, by two seasoned actors at the top of their game. “It’s not easy for me to admit that I’ve been standing in the same place for 18 years!” Troy bellows at one point. “Well I’ve been standing with you!” retorts Rose angrily and in tears. “I gave 18 years of my life to stand in the same spot as you!”

Washington and Davis are simply tremendous at the heart of a powerfully up-close-and-personal drama about marriage, fatherhood, responsibility and how the past informs it all.