Brow Beat

This Is the Story That Could Win Viola Davis an Oscar for Fences

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Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Oscar contender Fences.

Paramount Pictures

Fences, Denzel Washington’s big-screen adaptation of the late August Wilson’s celebrated play, has already been pegged as an Oscar front-runner, especially for Washington and Viola Davis’ lead performances. (Davis will reportedly be submitted in the Supporting Actress category, but that’s a matter of strategy, not the size of the role.) Thursday night’s screening for a small, invited audience at Manhattan’s Walter Reade Theater did nothing to derail the conventional wisdom that Washington and especially Davis can already start writing their acceptance speeches, but as far as cementing a win on Feb. 26, the post-screening Q&A might have been even more important.

The knock on Fences will be that it’s overly theatrical, not least because Washington, Davis, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby, and Stephen McKinley Henderson all reprise their roles from the play’s 2010 Broadway production. (Jovan Adepo’s Cory is the only major new face.) Working from a screenplay by Wilson, who died in 2005, Washington resists the urge to “open up” the play; although Washington relocates a few scenes and adds one wordless montage, the vast majority of the film takes place, as the play did, in and around a modest Pittsburgh house. The academy’s not averse to awarding films based on plays, but it tend to prefer its adaptations more flamboyantly “cinematic.” (See Chicago, the last stage-to-film adaptation to win Best Picture.)

Enter Viola Davis, who explained after the screening that she saw the movie as not just a record of the acclaimed theatrical production but an improvement on it. Davis knew the material cold after playing the role of Rose onstage for 13 weeks, but that, she said, could easily have been “a trap”; in order to prevent performing by rote, she’d emphasize different words in the familiar lines “just to wake me up.” But more than keeping it fresh, the film represented for her “an opportunity to fix something that I never got right onstage”—specifically, Rose’s final monologue, in which she reflects on how she had to “give up little pieces” of her strength in order to keep her family together. “It was my choice,” Rose says. “It was my life and I didn’t have to live it like that. But that’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman, and I took it.”

“There was one day for hours we went through the scene over and over again,” Davis recalled of the Broadway production. “I said, ‘At some point, I’m gonna get it. I went to Juilliard. I’m gonna get it.’ Never got it, until I did the movie. You know when you’re not getting it right. You know when you’re coasting. Every time I would get to that scene, every single night, I would want it to be over. That was my internal monologue.” She laughed. “I can admit that now because it’s over. I would have never said that then. ‘Let it just be over, because nothing’s happening.’ To be honest with you, one of the reasons why I didn’t get it was because I said, ‘OK, she did of this because she wanted this baby? Really?’ She didn’t want, like, a great job at a bank? And then I became a mother after that. And then everything changed. My heart changed. Your whole being changes. And then all of a sudden I got it.”

It’s a great story, and it’s one you’re probably going to be hearing a lot as Davis works the campaign trail between now and February. Of all the awards-giving bodies, Oscar voters are the most susceptible to the desire to fulfill a narrative—the birth of an ingénue, the late-career comeback—and smart campaigns are built to exploit (or, when necessary, invent) them. You might have gotten tired of Leonardo DiCaprio talking about eating raw bison liver while shooting The Revenant, but it was a story that perfectly encapsulated the work he put into the performance, and it worked.

Davis’ story is just as effective as DiCaprio’s. You could tell by the audible “Mmmm-hmmm” that ran through the room as she said, “And then I became a mother.” (I’m not exaggerating; I have it on tape.) It casts the role of Rose as the culmination of not only Davis’s career but her personal life, outlines the failures that paved the way for her current triumph, and it makes even an actress of her undeniable stature seem relatable and down to earth. Washington, who has often described himself as “an ordinary person with an extraordinary job,” went a similar route when he was asked about his method for directing himself: “Four takes, let’s move on.”

None of that’s to suggest that Davis’s story isn’t true, or at least based in truth; the best stories usually are. But on the awards circuit, anecdotes are weaponized, and Viola Davis is pulling out the big guns.