Movie Review: Fences **

If you like August Wilson's plays, and you like seeing them enacted on the screen with little scene change and page after page after page of dialogue (I heard Viola Davis say that her first speech in the film was 35 pages long), you'll like the movie version of Fences.

I'm sure it's no secret which side of the fence I'm on here (pun intended).
August Wilson is too talky for me. There's little action. His work is all about getting into the psyche of the common man, which is fine, but I don't connect to his characters. Not because I'm a middle-class white woman, but because there's not usually anything likable or relateable or sympathetic or vulnerable about them; nothing to connect me to them.
I went to see the movie because of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Denzel, even though he's nominated for an Academy Award, isn't believable in this role. He sounds like an upper-class black guy trying to sound like a lower-class black guy.
I stayed for an hour and was so worn out by all the yelling and poor-me speeches and his supposedly good-intentioned mistreatment of his son that I walked out.
And see that picture above? That must be an outtake, because there's no smiling in this film. At least not in the first hour.
Even though it's not fair to judge a whole movie by an hour, I'm doing it anyway.
2 stars out of five for Fences.