Review: Wilson's words sing in Washington's 'Fences'

The blue music of "Fences" sings with a ferocious beauty in Denzel Washington's long-in-coming adaptation of August Wilson's masterpiece of African-American survival and sorrow.

Wilson claimed to have never seen or read Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" before writing "Fences," but the two works are undeniably linked in their grand, wrenching portraits of bone-tired mid-century American men coming to the realization of how little their lifetime of work has gotten them.

Maxson, an illiterate former Negro League baseball star who spent 15 years in prison, is a nine-to-five, blue-collar patriarch in loud revolt against a life that's ground him down.

First and foremost is his wife, the demure but formidable Rose (Viola Davis), who gradually moves from the kitchen toward the center of the film.

Washington keeps almost entirely to the play's settings, but the most notable exception is its first scene where Maxson and his friend Jim Bono (a soulful Stephen McKinley Henderson) ride on the back of a garbage truck, up and down Pittsburgh's hills, while Maxson rails against the lack of black drivers.

Fences," a Paramount Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "thematic elements, language and some suggestive references.