Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Fall Film Festival Season continues with the EU Film Fest, showing free films from across Europe at Spadina Theatre starting on the 14th.

This week, I’m looking at three family dramas. There’s Black siblings in Pittsburgh, Jewish cousins in Warsaw, and an Irish dad with his five daughters, in… well, Ireland.

The Piano Lesson

Dir: Malcolm Washington

It’s 1936. Boy Willie Charles (John David Washington) and his friend Lymon are driving north from Mississippi with a truckload of watermelons, to visit his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She’s living with their uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson). Once they sell the melons, Boy Willie plans to take his share of the profit (along with his savings) to purchase Sutter’s land. That’s the same place where his great grandparents were slaves, and where he still toils the land as a share-cropper. This is his one chance to own it.  But he’ll only have enough money if he sells the family piano. That’s why he’s visiting Pittsburgh. But Berniece refuses to sell it. Why? She grew up playing that piano, and more to the point it has family faces elegantly carved into the wood itself, dating back to pre-Civil War days. Besides, she says, that piano is haunted… and the ghost is getting meaner.  Meanwhile various family and friends, like a trickster and a preacher, are congregating at this house with different motives for being there. Can Boy Willie and Berniece come to terms about the piano? Or will bad spirits — both supernatural and human — ruin everything first?

The Piano Lesson is an excellent filmed version of playwright August Wilson’s drama. Fine acting all around, with Danielle Deadwyler outstanding as Berniece. Now, plays and movies are two different things. Actors emote louder and move bigger on stage (so everyone can see and hear them). And even the blocking and dialogue is different. Movies are no more real, but different. This Piano Lesson is very much a play. So I was a bit put off by it’s style… until the my brain started watching it as a play, at which point I really liked it.

If you notice a lot of Washingtons here, it’s no coincidence. Denzel Washington is the producer, and actor John David and director Malcolm are both sons of his. Denzel is committed to putting all ten of August Wilson’s Pittsburg Cycle on the big screen to preserve crucial Black American culture. Witness Fences in 2016 and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020. The Piano Lesson is a fine addition to this series and should be watched.

A Real Pain

Wri/Dir: Jesse Eisenberg 

Benji and David Kaplan are cousins in their 30s, as close as brothers, but totally different. Benji (Kieran Culkin) is loud, gregarious, obnoxious and larger than life. He likes to raise a ruckus and mess things up. He lives alone in Binghamton, NY. David is shy, insecure and withdrawn. He’s married with a small kid and lives in Manhattan. He’s in a constant state of dithering and worrying. They’re travelling together to Poland to explore their family’s heritage. Their grandmother was Polish and a Holocaust survivor.

Benji was very close to her and devastated by her recent death, much more so than David. They’re part of a small tour group, all Jewish. Their guide (Will Sharpe) is a nerdy  English guy, very accommodating. Also on the tour are Marcia (Jennifer Grey) who suffers from intergenerational trauma;  Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) from Winnipeg but originally from Rwanda where he survived Tutsi genocide; and a middle-class couple whose family immigrated from Poland generations ago but want to see where they came from. (“We’re Mayflower Jews”, he says).

Their journey takes in cultural and historical sites across Poland, but the closer they get to the concentration camp where their grandmother was imprisoned, the more agitated Benji gets.  He slips into shouted diatribes and lectures, causing scenes within their group and in public places — to David’s acute embarrassment. Can they both make it through the whole tour? Or will one of them drop out?

A Real Pain is a low-key, social comedy — yes, a comedy — about the uncomfortable dynamics within a family. it’s actually pretty funny, No slapstick or pratfalls, rather unexpected squirmy riffs on the two main characters’ personalities. (Like Benji telling David his bare feet are gorgeous, making him stare at them for the rest of the trip.)  It’s told in a series of clever vignettes over the course of the trip,  all hovering over unvoiced feelings of personal and collective mourning.   I’m always suspicious when actors play at directing, but this is no vanity pic. Eisenberg stays suitably subdued, letting Culkin go wild.

I like this movie.

Small Things Like These

Dir: Tim Mielants

It’s winter in a small town in Ireland in the 1980s. Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a working man who scrubs coal dust off his hands and face each day. But he doesn’t work in a coal mine; he has his own business, built from scratch, selling coal. His wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and his eldest daughter handle the finances. One day, he’s making a delivery when he’s alarmed to see a teenaged girl being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the local convent. That’s not right. She may be unmarried and pregnant, but why are they kidnapping that poor girl? 

So he steps inside to take a look. It’s the Magdalene Laundries, a Church organization that operates across Ireland, to care for unwed mothers. They put the babies up for adoption, and the girls and young women are trained to work as industrial laundresses. But to Bill it seems almost like a prison, where the girls are treated horribly. When one girl runs over, begging him to help her escape, he doesn’t know to do. The nuns quickly disabuse him of any notions he might have, and rush him out the front door. 

But Bill has history. He was brought up in this same town by his own single mum, who chose to stay away from that convent. He was bullied as a child because of this, but he still remembers how his mother — and her employer, an independently wealthy woman — defied the church. He feels he has to do something for that girl. But the nuns have their fingers in every pie; the school, government, they’re even a client of his own business. Should he confront the cold-eyed Sister Mary (Emily Watson) who runs everything? Or should he just worry about  his own family, and pretend nothing is wrong?

Small Things Like These is a deeply-moving drama about families, moral dilemmas and the checkered history of the Catholic Church in Ireland. This is the third such movie, after The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena, but its repercussions are still very much alive. Cillian Murphy —  who you probably recognize from Oppenheimer or Peaky Blinders — once again pulls you into the character he plays. He rarely speaks but the emotion in his features really affect you. So if you’re looking for a real tear-jerker, this is the one to watch.

A Real Pain, Small Things Like These, and The Piano Lesson all open in Toronto this weekend; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.