![]() ![]() “You gotta be able to get your mouth around it. “Pain is pain, loss is loss, hurt is hurt,” Washington, who won a Tony Award in 2010 for his portrayal of Maxson on Broadway, said in a recent interview. He is a working-class everyman, paunchy and gray, distant from his son, deceitful to his wife (Oscar-nominated Viola Davis), a disillusioned former baseball player writing and preaching his own bible with poetry, fierceness and humor mined from the grit of experience. ![]() His Maxson is an angry cauldron of words, a black father entangled as much in the racism of the 1950s as in the sins and delusions of his own making. Washington directed the film and has emerged as a late favorite for the lead actor Oscar. He carries his age like the teenager who wanted to be “Shaft” or “Super Fly” but turned into something bigger, an actor of intricate parts, including his latest, Troy Maxson, the flawed and bitter Pittsburgh sanitation worker in August Wilson’s “Fences.” He smiles, smooth, like he could whisper a secret and then turn around and steal it from you. So many things writ into his characters, saint, conniver, fallen soul, dreamer, and a laugh that comes at you like a roll of thunder. Denzel Washington strolls in dressed all baggy: ingratiating, sly, a man of eloquence and scat, quiet and crescendo. ![]()
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