‘American Fiction’ Is a Scathing Satire, a Family Drama, and an Absolute Triumph
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Thelonious “Monk” Ellison has hit his breaking point. The students in his Southern-lit class at the prestigious university he teaches at are oversensitive snowflakes. His superiors think he needs a break from academia. Monk’s novels may still be in print, but you wouldn’t know it; they’ve all been relegated to the bottom shelf of the “African-American Studies” section of chain bookstores, simply because he’s a Black author. (“The Blackest thing about these books are the ink!” he yells.) An illness and a tragedy send his already dysfunctional family into a tailspin. His publisher can’t sell his latest, because no one’s buying the intellectually rigorous work he’s selling. What’s popular right now, he tells him, are books like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto — an outrageous ‘hood tale brimming with stereotypes written by the hot new writer Sintara Golden, one that appeals to white readers’ sense of Black life as nothing but fodder for feel-bad poverty porn. His advice to Monk: Write something “Blacker.”
Maybe it’s Golden’s laudatory profile in the Atlantic, or the onslaught of mass media that presents a one-dimensional view of the Black experience, or the biohazardous combo of grief and frustration curdled into contempt that fills Monk’s waking hours. Maybe it’s just one bourbon too many one night. But in a fit of rage, Monk decides to take up that challenge. He puts fingertips to keypads and starts typing out the most offensive parody of a fear-and-loathing-in-the-ghetto drama he can imagine. Monk takes on the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh and calls this magnum opus My Pathology. No, wait, scratch that: My Pafology. There you go. That will show them.
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His publisher goes into a state of shock. What the hell is Monk doing? “It’s got deadbeat dads, rappers, crack, and [someone] gets killed by a cop in the end,” Monk replies. “That’s ‘Black,’ right?!” He dares him to send the manuscript out. And suddenly our righteous hero finds himself in the middle of a bidding war while fielding seven-figure movie offers. The book isn’t just a hit. It’s the literary event of the year.
If writer-director Cord Jefferson had simply stuck to the basics of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, he still would have given us a sharp, scathing satire in the same manner as, say, Bamboozled or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. What he’s doing with his directorial debut American Fiction, however, goes way beyond a simple adaptation. Jefferson has done justice to the source material. But he’s also given us a comedy that’s furious yet funny, empathetic yet unafraid to call bullshit, and emotionally grounded even as it slaps a giant bullseye on the back of a blinkered, back-patting, bottom-line-obsessed industry. (Substitute “publishing” with “Hollywood,” and the slings and arrows still sting.) Not to mention: he’s crafted a showcase for one of the greatest working actors today, melded Swiftian commentary with a tender look at family dynamics, and thread his own singular voice throughout. If this is his first film, you can only imagine where he goes from here.
Jefferson isn’t new to the business of show — a former journalist-turned-TV-writing-room MVP, he’s worked on everything from Succession to Watchmen. (He won an Emmy for penning the latter’s groundbreaking “This Extraordinary Being” episode.) So there’s a strong chance that he understands the death-by-a-thousand-cuts that a Black creative like Monk, played with the perfect mix of condescension and compassion by Jeffrey Wright, might suffer by trying to maintain a standard of excellence in an arena that actively rewards lowest-common-denominator pandering. And you can imagine the filmmaker nodding as Monk shakes his head at the endless recycling of trauma-porn that simplifies — or worse, reductively codifies — a rich, multilayered and wide-ranging human experience into the same three miserablist narratives. “Representation matters” is not a facile platitude fit only for bumper stickers and social-media likes. It’s a consequential truth.
With American Fiction, Jefferson sets out to take the plainly incurious, predominantly white establishment to task for largely treating the Black experience as endless tragedy fodder and little else. (The way that publishing-house execs, marketing toadies, and modern literary types fall over themselves to praise the novel — now retitled Fuck — is hilarious, and likely only seems exaggerated; their behavior is almost assuredly mild compared to the real thing.) He also offers a proof-of-concept counternarrative as well. The melding of racially tinged, tightrope-skipping satire and family drama is in Everett’s book, but it’s one thing to mix those two things on the page and another on the screen; if someone said, “I’ll combine Putney Swope with Terms of Endearment,” your answer would be a wide-eyed, slack-jawed stare.
Yet the writer-director has found a way to make both elements work seamlessly with each other sans any tonal whiplash, and the result makes American Fiction somehow feel both over-the-top and grounded. Both sides begin to inform each other: Monk’s stunned disbelief at hearing Sintara (Issa Rae, killing it) reading a ridiculous passage from her book to a fawning audience sits comfortably next to Monk bantering in the car with his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross). The scenes of Monk’s agent (John Ortiz) pushing him to make his alter ego more and more “street” during negotiating deals easily coexists next to a long conversation between the author and his recently out-of-the-closet brother Clifford (a wonderful Sterling K. Brown) who’s harbored bitterness over their lopsided relationship for years. Even the more emotionally heartfelt and heavy scenes with Monk’s mom (Leslie Uggams), who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, and his new girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander) feel like they aren’t being undermined by “Stagg” meeting a film producer (Adam Brody) who’s bragging about his upcoming slave-revenge parable Plantation Annihilation.
It helps that American Fiction has, at its center, someone who gives Monk a keen intelligence, a razor-sharp wit, and a spiky exterior, as well as showing you the perpetually scratched romantic beneath the battle-tested cynic. To declare that Jeffrey Wright is a national treasure is nothing new — anyone who’s seen his theater work, watched him make the most of the tiniest supporting roles and given life to mercurial artists (Basquiat), seen-it-all healthcare workers (Angels in America), civil-rights icons (Rustin, in which he plays Adam Clayton Powell), paranoid androids (Westworld) and more can attest to that.
Yet when you watch Wright feel out the contours and add several dozen notes of grace to the misanthropic Monk, neither judging this man who’s in over his head nor letting his snobby behavior off the hook, you truly understand why few screen performers can match him. Even the way he silently registers WTF disbelief through his eyes, his slightly open mouth, and a shudder of his head as he reads over praise for Golden’s book makes you feel like you’re watching a musician make a quick 12-bar run. There’s not a bunk note anywhere in his performance.
Everything that Jefferson and his cast have been carefully laying down finally comes to a head in what’s arguably American Fiction’s best scene, in which Monk tries to passively-aggressively attack Sintara over the way he believes she’s selling out the culture. The back and forth between Wright and Rae is so calibrated yet so conversational, even when the verbal thrusts and parries heat up, breaking every bit of pro- and con- dogma into dust particles. It’s not a spoiler to say that it ends in a draw; Jefferson doesn’t claim to have the answers, nor does he want to issue guilty or not guilty verdicts. But he does want to talk out these conflicting feelings his characters represent — to him, and to us — and see what we can come up with by looking at these issues head-on.
And just when you think the film is about to fade out on an ambivalent note, American Fiction drops a series of endings on you that tie together the satirical and the dramatic, the sympathetic and the seething. It then adds a coda that makes you realize that the movie has really been, at its core, a character study. Monk is not “fixed.” He’s also not the same person we met two hours earlier. And it’s to the movie’s credit that it counts a victory by inches as a genuine victory.
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