The Piano Lesson

There are so many movies playing at the Broadway right now that I want to see so I decided on a double feature last night (I have another one planned for tonight).  I started with The Piano Lesson and, even though I found it to be uneven, I enjoyed it.  It is a sprawling story about several generations of the Charles family beginning in rural Mississippi with the purchase of a piano by James Sutter (Jay Peterson) for his wife Ophelia (Melanie Jeffcoat).  He trades two of his slaves, Bernice and her young son Boy Charles, to buy it but Ophelia misses them so he has Willie Boy Charles (Malik J. Ali) carve the faces of his wife and son on the piano.  The grown up Boy Charles (Stephan James) and his brothers Wining Boy and Doaker eventually steal the piano but Boy is caught and burned alive.  Years later the piano belongs to Boy's daughter Berenice (Danielle Deadwyler), who lives in Pittsburgh with Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson) and Wining Boy (Michael Potts), but his son Boy Willie (John David Washington) wants to sell it to buy the land in Mississippi once owned by the Sutters.  Berenice and Willie Boy clash over the piano because she believes it is an important reminder of her past and refuses to sell it while he sees it as a way to secure his future.  This exploration of one family's legacy is very powerful but, in my opinion, a supernatural subplot involving the haunting of the piano by the ghost of James Sutter, including a dramatic exorcism by Berenice's boyfriend Avery Brown (Corey Hawkins), is less compelling.  There are a lot of characters to keep track of (I was sometimes confused about who was who as well as the relationships between everyone) and a few extraneous scenes that create some strange tonal shifts (my mind often wandered when the action strayed from the central conflict).  However, I loved the performances, particularly the juxtaposition between the wild and exuberant Washington and the restrained Deadwyler.  I really liked this but not as much as I thought I would and I recommend waiting for it to stream on Netflix.