Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, American Fiction, has a fun comedic premise, though it doesn’t use this to its full potential. Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, the film similarly takes aim at American publishing and its desire for tales of Black suffering. Anti-social author and college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) lampoons this grim thirst with a gaudy parody that becomes an accidental hit.
‘American Fiction’ trailer has a Black author’s stereotype-riddled joke novel become an unexpected hit
However, the further American Fiction goes, the more this lampooning of the white literary world begins to stagnate, offering little insight as its parallel tale of Monk’s family woes takes center stage. A much more enticing story starts to emerge, but the film is seldom able to reconcile these two disparate halves. An all-star ensemble goes a long way towards making it work as a coherent domestic drama, but this saga of one writer’s narrow point-of-view is hampered by a depressingly limp satire of Black trauma porn with little insight.
What is American Fiction about?
Credit: Courtesy of ORION Pictures Inc.
In the film’s opening scene, Monk gets into a heated argument with a white student over the use of the N-word in a literary context (Monk happens to be firmly pro). This verbal scuffle serves up the possibility of some kind of biting nuance while also allowing us a look at Monk’s temperament. He’s subsequently sent on sabbatical, and his bitterness in the face of not getting his way catalyzes American Fiction‘s plot; the character is forced to take stock of his dwindling publishing career, though he approaches his next steps from a place of radical disdain. However, the scene’s apparent promise of probing into racial dynamics in the contemporary social climate isn’t actually something in which the movie is particularly interested.
Shortly thereafter, Monk comes across a hit new novel at a public reading — with a title composed of intentionally clunky AAVE: We’s Lives In Da Ghetto — and is left baffled by the resounding applause from white onlookers. Its author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) is presented as a well-dressed, well-to-do, well-spoken college graduate whom he can’t help but see as a phony interloper profiting off broad stereotypes of Black misery. This is the scene that spurs Monk into action, and it’s one that Jefferson establishes without the use of extraneous dialogue, proving him to be a deft comedic storyteller when it matters. All it takes for us to understand Monk’s disgust, and the fire that Golden inadvertently lights under his ass, is a handful of reaction shots — both to an exhausted Monk and to an enthusiastic white crowd moved to tears — alongside a fine-tuned reveal of the novel’s maudlin material. An impeccably timed push-in towards Rae as she reads a passage from Golden’s book creates a hilariously charged cinematic moment, as she adjusts her posture while dipping into broad stereotypes, but without her performance tipping too far into goofy self-parody. (“Yo, Sharonda! Girl, you be pregnant again?” she exclaims, in an exaggerated cadence bordering on minstrelsy.) Unfortunately, this is about as well-crafted as Jefferson’s literary satire gets.
It isn’t long before Monk, after conferring with his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) about his prospects — “They want a Black book,” Arthur says, to which Monk responds, “I’m Black, and it’s my book” — decides to write his next novel as a middle finger to publishers who insist on boxing him in until he’s just another Sintara Golden. “My Pathology,” he begins to type, before re-titling his gangsta-parody novel My Pafology. It’s a fantastic starting point for American Fiction, even if Jefferson quickly runs out of steam and begins depending largely on stilted dialogue exchanges to deliver his jokes and get his point across.
Much to Monk’s simultaneous surprise and dismay, his fake ghetto crime story is an instant hit with publishers, far more than any of the work he wrote under his real name (for My Pafology, he uses the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a play on the African American folk outlaw and blues inspiration, Stagger Lee). In the meantime, he’s also forced to return home to take care of his ailing, widowed mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), alongside his much-more-successful doctor siblings: the diligent Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), and the hedonistic, recently out-of-the-closet Cliff (Sterling K. Brown). The drama therein takes surprising and heartwarming turns, forming a de facto counterpoint to My Pafology; Monk’s real story is the kind of multifaceted Black experience that rarely gets its due in mainstream publishing and cinema. However, Monk’s perspective is far too blinkered to recognize the full extent of the beautiful, complex lives unfolding around him.
While the movie rarely reconciles these two warring halves, the story unfolding behind the scenes, far away from the concerns of the publishing world, proves mostly absorbing.
American Fiction is a deft domestic drama.
Credit: Claire Folger © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC.
Much of the Ellison family drama unfolds at a beach house getaway, a familiar locale to which the siblings decide to take their mother after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis. They travel there with their loving housekeeper, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), and across the street, Monk also runs into a neighbor, Coraline (Erika Alexander), with whom he shares a few sparks and a couple of drinks. For the most part, this remains almost entirely isolated from the saga of Monk’s accidental success, barring a few conversations with Coraline about My Pafology, at which point she’s unaware of its actual author.
As a self-contained story, it mostly works. Monk’s frustrations about the book’s surprise popularity boil over into occasional narcissistic outbursts. Though for the most part, this domestic detour functions as downtime from the My Pafology kerfuffle, during which he ruminates on his family history and fractured relationships. Like with Golden — whom Rae is allowed to portray with a more detailed humanity in a later scene — Jefferson’s presentation of these supporting characters creates an intriguing dynamic, as though we were seeing only half-formed people at first whose stories were unfolding in the margins of the film, given Monk’s unwillingness to see the bigger picture. Lorraine, for instance, ends up involved in a sweet, feel-good love story with an old flame, and while this takes place almost entirely off-screen, what little of it we (and Monk) are afforded is exuberant in its depiction of middle-aged romance. The question remains: Will Monk allow himself to recognize this?
The same question is posed by the hints we’re given of the other characters too. Lisa seems imposing. Coraline is simple, straightforward, and doting. Cliff has a lonely and destructive streak. And yet, despite being in these people’s proximity, Monk has a hard time looking past their superficial details — ironically, it’s as though he sees them as “types,” akin to Golden’s characters — even though the camera, and the actors’ performances, slowly reveal more depth and humanity than Monk seems capable of fathoming.
Tying all this together are soulful performances by Wright and Uggams as a son increasingly content in his emotional cocoon and a mother with whom he’s slowly losing his connection as her memories slip away. It’s perhaps the highlight of their respective careers, and it affords Wright room as a complex romantic lead, the kind of role we’ve seldom seen him play. However, little of this ends up adequately resolved or with the requisite catharsis, since this series of subplots is still largely dependent on the movie’s central premise, which grows dispiritingly thin over the course of two hours.
American Fiction‘s comedic premise is mostly wasted.
Credit: Claire Folger © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC.
There’s a type of joke that works well early on in American Fiction, taking full advantage of Jefferson and editor Hilda Rasula’s comic timing, as well as the snarky air Wright conjures around Monk. That joke is about the eagerness and enthusiasm of white liberals to overcompensate with their admiration for “brave” material by artists of color, even if that braveness mawkishly panders to their sensibilities. Monk may be frustrated every time one of his attempts to hold a mirror to his white publishers goes awry — each time he writes an increasingly cartoonish subplot adjacent to poverty and crime, they accept it as raw and realistic — but the joke is ultimately on them. Their ignorance is the punchline, and it’s funny the first, second, and maybe even the third time it happens. But this is practically the only joke the movie has.
It doesn’t transform in any way, despite recurring ad nauseam, and it says nothing new about Monk’s predicament, about racism in publishing, or about racism at large. Monk, when pretending to be Leigh over the phone and in person — an escaped convict persona he concocts to sell his ruse — is clearly uncomfortable embodying the very stereotypes in which he now inadvertently trades, and Wright’s conflicted performance is a joy to watch the first time he forces out expletives with which he seems unfamiliar. But this, too, becomes a repetitive gag with no variation, except for one stellar joke involving an ambulance which another character mistakes for police sirens — don’t worry if you miss it, because the movie makes sure to stop and re-explain.
The biggest problem with how American Fiction approaches its premise is that it has no idea what it wants to say with Monk or how to say it. Unlike the book’s version of Monk — who, early into Everett’s novel, mentions how he doesn’t care to see race — the movie’s conception of the character is two dimensional in this respect. It reduces him to his function within this plot rigamarole without exploring his relationship to the notions of Blackness against which he’s pushing, let alone what might be perceived as a proximity to whiteness through his family’s wealth and status. Outside of the specific conundrum posed by My Pafology, the film’s ideas of race and class are surprisingly malformed, but its presentation of this faux novel also proves surprisingly half-baked.
In Erasure, Everett — who was “inspired” by books like Push by Sapphire, the eventual basis for the movie Precious — presents the text of My Pafology in full. And while a one-to-one adaptation of this would likely have required turning Monk into a director so that we could see his filmic parody play out, the movie’s version of presenting My Pafology has its own uniquely cinematic conception, at least initially. When Monk first conceives of the novel in his study, the characters appear around him and enact his heavy-handed plot as a sort of black box play, offering us a vivid look at how he perceives the limits to Black representation in the literary world. However, these “characters” appear only once, leaving us to imagine the debate between broad types and lived reality going on in Monk’s head.
For the most part, My Pafology remains a mystery, and so too does Monk’s outlook (and the film’s) on the pitfalls of commodifying Black pain and reducing Blackness to a series of tropes. The one time the film gets overtly metatextual and self-referential, it isn’t to make specific comment about Black trauma in books and cinema but to avoid fully doing so, with an ending that especially feels like a cop-out with the way it skirts around giving both Monk’s satire and his real-life drama any significant conclusion.
None of the aforementioned drama has a sense of closure, and perhaps worst of all, American Fiction barely even toys with its most exciting comedic throughline: the idea that Monk may have to eventually reveal himself as Leigh and reckon with the consequences. How and when the movie chooses to pull the trigger on its ending is downright baffling to watch. The movie is rife with exciting setups, but ultimately, it fails to give them proper punchlines.
How to watch: American Fiction opens in theaters Dec. 15.
