Three Reasons To See Fences Before the Oscars

3. The spirituality. Fences is about Troy Maxson and his relationships with his wife and son. But maybe even more so, it’s about his relationship with God. With his own fractured soul.

The film is filled with explicit moments of spirituality—particularly when Troy’s disabled brother Gabriel comes around, carrying a trumpet he plans to blow on Judgment Day. Gabriel says he’s been to heaven. Says he’s seen Troy’s name inscribed in Peter’s book. And indeed, Troy is a good man. Decent. Maybe even blessed.

But there’s a devil in Troy, too, and Troy knows it. His father was an evil man, he says, “just as evil as he could be.” Troy ran away when he was 14 after his father brutally beat him. “I knew why the devil never got him, ’cause he’s the devil himself.” He says he has some of his father in him. A darkness. And perhaps he’s been at war with it ever since. We see it come out.

Sometimes we see this struggle play out in the heavens themselves—sun piercing the shadowed clouds, a stormy night when Troy curses at death. Fences is more than a kitchen drama: It’s flat-out spiritual warfare, where Troy both defends the walls and hammers at the gates. Gabriel’s Judgment Day trumpet is so significant because aging Troy’s on the way to his own.

And in a haunting turn, Troy’s sensitive son, Cory, admits he can feel Troy’s own shadow at work in him. “You can’t be nobody but who you are, Cory. That shadow wasn’t nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you.”

Now, Fences is not trying to make a theological statement, of course. But it is about a man who wants to be good and bad, too—just like we all do sometimes. For a story so tightly honed in a very individualistic man, the film’s themes are so universal. We fight to be the person we should be. But sometimes—many times, maybe—we get in our own way. Our fears and insecurities and unreasoned rage undercuts the best in us. And it can hurt the people we love more than anything.

And we haven’t even gotten to Rose, the movie’s moral core. It’s telling that a picture of Jesus hangs over her stove and a relief of the Last Supper in her dining room, given how much of herself she’s sacrificed for her husband.

Fences is a difficult, stormy film. But man, it’s pretty good, too.