These are works that find parallel lines of race( FENCES and FRUITVALE STATION) and police procedurals(THE OFFENCE and TOP OF THE LAKE) in instances of art imitating life. So I position two similarly themed works together and disseminate my own thoughts.
Here they are. Lest I forget to add, this post also appears on my blog AN AWADH BOY'S PANORAMA: TRACING WORDS ON THESE FILIGREED, DISCERNING FINGERTIPS.
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FENCES(2016) and FRUITVALE STATION(2013)
For me, the irony in both instances of filmmaking mentioned here first is in the esteemed positions of the actors enacting their parts, summoning the history of the black experience to show that a common humanity pervades ; they are still not above the collective consciousness of a community, as evidenced by Spike Lee's acknowledgement of the passage from slavery to his own place in the cultural pantheon, as regards his familial legacy, while receiving his first proper Oscar in February 2019 for BLACKKLANSMAN's original screenplay . In FENCES and FRUITVALE STATION, working class lives are ingrained in the African American experience, with startlingly realistic payoffs taken from real life cases. The truth is never forgotten.
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FENCES has a lope like movement to the verbose / wordy screen iteration , especially in the case of the chatterbox that is Denzel. Or maybe it is a steady sprint of wordplay to offset darker portals of personal selfhood on his part. It is, to a large degree.
This is a view from the inside out, not a political pan at race. Talking about it is no mean feat as much as we would prefer to put it on a far off shelf. Addressing it within a community is the hard earned task cut out for participants, in an unit, the most universal being the family as is the case in FENCES based on August Wilson's play. The scalding touch of dreams not fulfilled by systemic racism comes full circle as the protagonist here has a job in the municipality as a garbage collector - essentially a pivotal work of God but lowest in the rungs of our class conscious world. The tipping point is when his jollity mixes with his curdled rage. He swings his bat at destiny and words come out from him which everybody will identify from verbal lashings received at the hands of a patriarch.
Take the title beyond a literal reading ; the untended fence in the backyard of the family's modest one storey flat is symbolic of the work left to perform on our personal fronts, the one we often sidestep in the name of working for our daily bread and as in here, the surface veneer of a happy family is the front most conducive to humans. The laughter is a mask, the hidden distortion is stubbornly suppressed to show only the laugh lines, not draw one's eyes to frown lines above. A smile goes on to steady the boat of life, as you see while a frown spells out intensity by the second, sometimes excusable on the man of the house's facial features as an essential component. FENCES traces the arch of the smile and the frown down to the resignation in an overall historical place for these and brethren like them. These are outsiders who have been undone by their identity, poverty, menial jobs, permanent mental health issues and standoffs endemic to father and son as well as between husband and wife, in that very order. Empathy is not easily detected in a minefield of tempestuous emotions. FENCES makes us achieve that for the man at its center and it's not very remote from what we see in our own patriarchs : weight of the world and care and concern for a family all split by the side, by a greatly troubled place in the larger navel of existence. The performances are exemplary and Viola Davis shows the range of women's lives, left to fight against men's weaker impulses and struggling to humanize one's own lifetime through sacrifices too many to number and preventing stiff opposition for her traditional thoughts from the new generation, in this case the son(Jovan Adepo) , himself caught in the crossfire between a beloved mother and a father he has come to detest. FENCES is so bristlingly honest, we will be left to question our foundations for defense within our own units. Like you do and I do, almost everyday. Is redemption only for the head of the family? Is a flawed personality a byproduct of too many evils visited upon one individual ? Where is the balance?
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