Why I loved the movie "Fences" (2016), with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis

 

First, this text contains spoilers!

THEY SAY men don’t cry when watching movies, but I have got to say that the movie "Fences" (2016), starred by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis has led me to the uncertain path of emotions.

In "Fences", Troy Maxson (DW) is the head of a poor family in 1950s, Pittsburgh. He works as a sanitation worker and since his teenage years he has been trying to survive the streets. Maxson has got two sons: Lyons (Russell Hornsby) and Cory (Jovan Adepo). Lyons is his first son, with his first wife, and Cory is the youngest, with Rose (Viola Davis), with whom he shares 18 years of his life.

 I loved this movie because, first, it has helped me to not judge people without knowing their history, which we often do. Troy had a horrible life, and he worked his entire adult life to feed and protect his family, but not for free, because his difficult life turned out to be also his death: Troy became a difficult person as a friend, a rude father and an unfaithful husband.

For me, the most interesting thing about this movie was his wife’s idea to build a fence around the house, in her opinion to defend the ones inside and prohibit the evil from the outside to get into the locus.

Troy took months and months to build the fence, and this delay turned out to be, in my opinion, his disgrace: because the fence was at the same time a real thing, but also a symbolic protection. The fact that he finished the fence only when he had lost everything tell us a lot about ourselves and our incapacity to listen to watch people tell us and rethink our attitudes. More, it tells us how much we bleed because of our past and how deep it can affect us.

If we look at the etymology of the word fence, we will observe that ‘fence’ walks together with ‘defense’, which means protect something against the enemy. As he did not build the fence in time, the evil has entered in his house, destroying everything it could.

Of course, the movie is a lot more than all of that, but this is one of the reasons on why people should watch and reflect on it!