Director: Denzel Washington
Release Date: 10th February 2017
Rating: 12A (UK), PG-13 (USA)
Style really does take priority over substance for Denzels' one-man-band; a whole lot of fuss for a film quite ordinary.
Fences in many ways mimics a 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, which essentially tells a tale of life, with no intentions to over-dramatise or show a Hollywood filter over events. The idea of Fences is paved with good intentions - it is not a cash-grab like past Denzel Washington movies have been, and the plot does flow at a consistent rate. That consistent rate in question happens to be, however, a sluggishly slow rate.
The movie seems to make a big fuss out of every little event that occurs; the opening of the film is a twenty minute conversation between Troy (Washington), his wife Rose (Viola Davis) and his best friend, Jim Bono (Stephen Henderson), with little context or connection to the rest of the film, with no other purpose than to make the characters appear more relatable - but this scene was far too drawn out to be a Tarantino-esque dialogue masterpiece.
Despite these attempts, Troy is not a relatable character at all either, in fact most of the decisions he makes throughout the movie are completely unreasonable and yet as the main character he is painted out to be the moral authority. The idea of excusing him for his actions simply because he is from a troubled background with many difficult situations to deal with at once, is not how the movie should deal with his character. A character can only be excused for their unrelatable actions if their reasons for their actions are relatable, which in this case, they are not.
Troy was played well by Washington, and most actors did a great job as a whole. Viola Davis was excellent in her role, and was essentially perfectly cast; Cory (Jovan Adepo) was good as Troy and Rose's son, attempting to impress his father constantly, and the emotions he conveyed whenever Troy would do something he disagreed with were authentic and natural as a performance.
The problem Fences has is that it doesn't really go anywhere. The film has great actors, and environment for those characters to be in, but no opportunity to make a fantastic film out of a worthy script, which has some lines which even repeat during the movie.
Fences does not really have a premise, there isn't a moral of the story and it appears like the film was put together as an idea before the script was even written to be able to simulate 'real life' action and conversation, but there was no need for all of this self-celebratory pretentious style which made the movie irritating to watch.
I never found myself engrossed in the plot at all, and I couldn't recommend this since I barely found myself caring about how events would unfold or what would happen to the characters.
