Starring Denzel Washington. Rated PG.

Denzel Washington gives a towering performance in his third film as director, an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences. But sometimes a tower can just be a symbol of oppression and not much else.

First produced in 1987, and set in the early 1950s, Wilson’s work is part of a 10-play cycle about growing up black and poor in Pittsburgh. Washington was so transfixed by the role of Troy Maxson, an ex-ballplayer turned garbage collector with more pride than common sense, he took that part (originally played by James Earl Jones) in a Broadway revival in 2010. He and Viola Davis, as Maxson’s wife Rose, each earned a Tony for their efforts.

There’s no denying Washington’s easy mastery of Troy’s bitter patter, mostly about his own greatness and the disappointments of a segregated world.

But what flows beautifully on-stage feels bullying on-screen, where the face of the perpetually angry husband and father becomes 20 feet tall, grossly magnifying the small terrors felt daily by Rose (Davis, again) and student son Cory (England’s Jovan Adepo). The lad sees opportunities in sports denied 20 years earlier, but even Troy’s surprise promotion to truck driver—previously a whites-only gig—can’t convince the older man that times really are a-changing.

This stern, if often smooth-talking, breadwinner replicates a cruel kind of social hierarchy at home, while finding his own freedom with something illicit on the side. He holds an older son (Russell Hornsby) in contempt for trying to escape through music, and saves most compassion for his own brother (Mykelti Williamson), mentally damaged by the Second World War. The totemically named Gabriel carries a battered trumpet and goes off on Bible-tinged rants that veer dangerously into Magical Negro territory.

As fluid as Wilson’s writing is, the work feels crucially dated—suggesting an Arthur Miller take on an all-black musical like Cabin in the Sky. Except for one Dinah Washington–fuelled montage for a needed breather, though, neither songs nor radical changes in location arrive to interrupt the ceaseless speechifying spread over almost two-and-a-half hours.

Only Davis manages to keep her responses sounding fresh and free of stagecraft. But her character, much like the audience, simply ends up maxed out on Troy Maxson.