sherineyousery

In her Oscar speech, the wonderful Viola Davis gave away the reason why she's an actress. She said she wants to tell stories that celebrate life. That's exactly what Fences is about. Celebrating the whole journey.

Fences is about a man, with so many fallen dreams. You can look at him and his dreams with very different lenses. You can see a man who has killed his own dreams, a man who chose to be miserable, stiff and unable to enjoy the little things in life. You can also see him as an innocent hardworking one who was pulled down with weights bigger than he could carry. You can see him as a lucky man considering his doings, who has a job, a family and a very good friend. And you can see him as all of these in one human being. There will be things you'll appreciate and others you don't, and that depends on who you are as a person.

Fences is also about poverty, about love and respect and how fine a line can be drawn between both. It's about the difference between what we can change and what we will have to accept. It is about choices. It is about our minds, how and what we choose to believe. There are also painful scenes about mental illness, painful and poetic and true. My personal opinion is that race is not one of the themes as others have pointed out. I guess the story is very universal, very inclusive.

The acting in the whole movie was one of the best I have ever seen. Amazing direction, amazing screenplay. Maybe the first 30 minutes weren't very eventful or purposeful, but the overall slow rate and steady rhythm were important to the story as a whole.

People who love slow movies, with good drama and realistic characters may enjoy this. I don't know if we can learn something out of it, just enjoy it or have some good discussions about its themes. I guess it offers something different for everyone.

What a wonderful movie ..

After watching too many movies, I learnt something very important: the rarest and most beautiful of movies are usually -but not always- unappreciated. Some movies become classics and I have no idea why, and others are simply overlooked when they have great things to teach ..

I have too much to say about this masterpiece, but here's a few points to try to sum up:

1- Judgment, we oven tend to judge without ever having a good thought or a tender approach. We do not care to listen to the story, we just condemn. This movie puts you right there, in an extraordinary unfamiliar situation you would normally judge and condemn anyone in, and tells you, "Deal with it" ..

2- Unconditional love. Too rare in the real world, too rare you'll see a human being loving another with all the demons inside. This is so unfortunate, for unconditional love usually opens the door for us to view the world in a completely different light and perception. What was extraordinary about this movie, is that it showed two types of unconditional love, one romantic and the other parental.

3- Good parenting doesn't mean transforming into a policeman, or choosing what your child should have as a hobby. True parenting means loving your child as he/she is, and most importantly, taking the time to live together. You share a life, you should not just preach about what's right and what's wrong, and I wished people would appreciate how a relationship like this is formed .. So beautifully portrayed when the mother took the time to teach her son about sex, not the bodily fluids and functions, as she says, but rather the feeling .. or when her son takes the time to make her breakfast in bed, rather than the father who just cares his son would not join a dance group so his peers wouldn't think he's gay.

4- True love is something we should value as much as our own lives. And you get a lot more from life when you know what your priorities are. Also, true love doesn't "develop" in weeks or months, sometimes it takes an eye-contact. Decades of living together or hardships do not make for two lovers, it makes for two "partners".

5- Beautiful people come in all sorts of form, and I usually view the most beautiful as the ones who've learnt the most from their pain, the most forgiving and the most "open-hearted" before "open-minded" .. Just pay a little more attention to what the father tells his son at the end of the movie about his ex-wife and you'll "feel" what I am talking about.

6- The movie was realistic, it didn't just alter the ending to fit or to have more of a "feel-good" garbage effect. With some exceptions as leaving the door unlocked sometimes, or all three of them playing outside, I consider the movie didn't lose its grip on reality.

Overall, this movie had some elements from "The bridges of Madison county" and others from "Mud", but still stands on its own as something different, interesting and thought-provoking. The flash-backs to both of their histories didn't matter to me much, because this is basically about unconditional love, so I appreciated the moment when Frank opens the album and sees her pregnant photo but doesn't ask, much more. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about redemption, unconditional love, relationships of many types and what hunger for love and human contact means. Not recommended at all if you didn't enjoy "The bridges of Madison county" and the kind of adult realistic Meryl Streep- drama movies. Very well acted, adapted and directed, I didn't have a dull moment, and the clichés were minimal.