‘The Piano Lesson’ movie review: Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington tear into this heart of darkness

The Piano Lesson: A haunting family legacy unfolds in a powerful adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer-Prize winning play on Netflix.

In The Piano Lesson, the piano in Doaker Charles’ (Samuel L. Jackson) house is not just a musical instrument. For his niece, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), it is a family heirloom, her legacy and her past. Berniece’s brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington) thinks differently. Just out of prison, Willie comes to Doaker’s house in Pittsburgh with his friend, Lymon (Ray Fisher) with a truck full of watermelons to sell. A sharecropper, Willie wishes to own land and make something of his life. He sees the piano as a way to be able to buy land.

Whenever Doaker’s elder brother, Wining Boy (Michael Potts) is in doldrums, he visits Doaker and reminiscences about his glory days as a piano player. For Wining Boy, the piano is a burden, which he has to carry around wondering “am I me or am I the piano player.”

Doaker tells the story of the piano, and why Berniece will not agree to ever sell it. Sutter (Jay Peterson), the family’s slave owner, bought the piano as an anniversary present for his wife, Miss Ophelia (Melanie Jeffcoat) in exchange for “one and a half slaves”. He broke up a family selling the mother and nine-year-old son for the piano. Ophelia was happy with the piano and played it all day long, but missed her slaves, became ill and took to her bed.

Sutter got the husband of the bartered slaves — a talented wood carver — to carve their likeness on the piano. Apart from the likeness of his wife and son, the slave also carved the entire history of his family on the piano. Boy Willie’s father stole the piano and was killed as he escaped on the Yellow Dog train. In retaliation, there were a series of inexplicable drownings, attributed to the ghosts of Yellow Dog. The Charles’ house is haunted by the ghost of the latest drowning and any attempt to move the piano results in ominous disturbances.

Scrupulously following the beats of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play, The Piano Lesson uses the closed confines of the Charles’ homestead to tell a story across space and time. Set in 1936, the set design and period detail are on the nose.

The characters can be looked at as archetypes — there is the narrator in Doaker, the future-fixated Boy Willie, Berniece, for whom being the bridge between the past and present becomes too much, her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), who represents the future, the preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins), who courts Berniece and advices her to move on, Wining Boy, the fool and Lymon, the shy stranger who finally is able to coax Berniece out of mourning.

The acting is fierce and fabulous. Jackson is practically unrecognizable as the neutral Doaker while Washington gives Boy Willie a ferocious turn. Both reprise their roles from the 2022 stage production with Fisher and Potts. Malcolm Washington, Denzel Washington’s son (who has co-produced the film with Todd Black) and John David Washington’s brother, makes his feature film debut with this spare film of rippling muscle and sinew, to tell a richly layered tale of coming to terms with the ghosts one’s past and one’s legacy.