American Fiction

 

Score:  A-

Directed by Cord Jefferson

Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae

Running time: 117 minutes

Rated R

Long Story Short:  American Fiction is director Cord Jefferson's first film but it's a good one, portraying both the wild and the domestic events in the life of a Black writer.  A brilliant cast breathes life into both the writer's family world - siblings, declining mother, and more - and his unexpected evolution from unknown academic to sensational best-selling author.  It's a little uneven, but that's more than compensated for by the performances and its thoughtfulness.  Highly recommended. 

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Wright) is a brilliant writer and teacher, but also a lonely and frustrated one.  Although his books receive literary praise, they don't sniff the best-seller lists, and he is asked to take a break from the university after his tension boils over in the classroom.  He returns to his hometown of Boston where he reconnects with siblings Lisa (Ellis) and Cliff (Brown) and his mother, Agnes (Uggams).  A sudden tragedy keeps Monk around longer than expected and, with large bills looming, grudgingly attempts a more popular writing style.  Monk feels both his personal and professional lives transforming rapidly and out of his control, and he'll have to choose what to fight - and what to accept.

American Fiction is a creative, well-made, and entertaining drama, though some dissonance in the film's tone and themes holds it back a little.  The story is straightforward drama, refreshingly ordinary in some ways. While focused on Monk, the film keeps momentum by alternating (imperfectly; more on this later) between his very realistic family life and his extraordinary professional life.  The personal side is the film's strongest element.  Monk and his family are Black, but most details of their relationships and living conditions are standard American; race is not really relevant.  It's serious, complex drama, with genuine characters and dynamics and great interactions among Monk, Lisa, Cliff, Agnes, and more.  The acting is tremendous, with Brown's Cliff and Uggam's Agnes being scene stealers.  The professional side of the story is much different: Monk's academic writer borders on caricature, disdainful of the "lower" art that gets all the attention.  There is plenty of humor here and some outrageous scenes and twists; it's almost Judd Apatow-like at times.  With such different strands to blend, the ending is impressively cohesive.  Demonstrating life's messiness, it doesn't really resolve the personal or professional concerns. There's also some sly ambiguity, especially with the fate of Monk's best-seller scheme gone awry.

American Fiction is multifaceted and keeps you thinking, but it falters a bit in its ambitious plans.  The significant difference in tone between Monk's personal and professional lives can be jarring.  While it's good to have variety, this back-and-forth also dampens the effectiveness of each side.  It makes sense to have humor and even some shock value as Monk awkwardly tries to pivot from his scholarly ambition to a pragmatic but unpleasant (to him) pop style.  It's also good to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of white people's embrace - yet condescension - of black culture and artists.  But the movie didn't have to be so hyperbolic to achieve this, I feel, and so it missed out on a more cutting edge it could have provided.  It is certainly still (cringingly) funny, though.

American Fiction is not trying to perfectly mirror today's cultural/artistic world, but it's close enough that the differences are disorienting.  Black Ebonics and 'hood life books are both best-sellers and critically praised here.  Monk loathes this not just because he feels his (and similar) works are superior art but because the best-sellers simply cater to pandering white expectations of stereotypical Black culture.  Monk believes - rightly - that Black culture is both much richer and more varied.  I agree with Monk, even though, as he acknowledges, there is also obviously value in communicating genuine Black experiences of poverty, violence, discrimination, too.  So the movie makes literary culture into kind of a "straw man": but in real life, there is plenty of excellent, rich literature by Black writers that is both popular and deservingly lauded by critics.  There's some use to critiquing Black and other cultural "trauma porn" but I wish American Fiction had gone further, even if only briefly, to highlight the bigger problem: that white America feels content with supporting Black artists and expressing guilt, but is not willing to take substantive action to support Black communities through voting rights, economic and educational opportunity, and so on.  But maybe that's for a different movie.

***

Two weeks in a row now my local theater has played Oscar Best Picture nominees - a great treat for a dreary January!  I had heard little of American Fiction before, other than seeing it get rave reviews in an issue of The Week (aside: that is an excellent news digest magazine, I highly recommend it!).  It's a return to great movies from Black filmmakers that were so prevalent in the mid-2010s but seemed to peter out a bit in recent years.  In that way, American Fiction is a little "meta" in its story, and while I don't think it did so perfectly, it's important that it continues the discussion.  So I hope that you get a chance to see this in a theater, too, as Oscar season continues to count down to the March 10 ceremony.  Until next time!

* By http://www.impawards.com/2023/american_fiction_ver2_xxlg.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75101757