Review: American Fiction

Director:  Cord Jefferson

Stars:  Jeffrey Wright, Issa Rae, Erika Alexander

Meet Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), esteemed author of a number of prestigious novels and yet, by his own inimitable yardstick, far from a success. While prideful of his works they haven’t quite broken the bank. In their wake he has witnessed a disconcerting trend in the types of stories presented to the public from the US’s largely white-owned publishing houses; prurient tales that fit the lowest-common-denominator assumptions of the Black experience in America. Tabloid sensationalism that sells fast but doesn’t – in his eyes – communicate anything. Indignant and more than a little jealous of the success of others, Monk fires up his laptop to teach the ignorant publishing houses a lesson.

Penning a slim parody titled “My Pafology” (sic) under the risible pun pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, Monk’s expectations are thwarted when the money men take the submission seriously and he is offered a sizeable advance. If only personal circumstances weren’t weighing on the decisions that follow…

Monk’s familial life is as much of a concern in American Fiction as the satirical Frasier episode summarised above. Death and tragedy haunt the Ellison clan. His father committed suicide in the family’s beachfront home, while his mother’s cognitive health is in the beginnings of a withering decline. Full-time professional care is an expensive consideration. Throw in the sudden death of sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and loss weighs heavy on Monk’s mind. The urge to gather and consolidate what remains is understandable.

Always the black sheep of the family, our man has grown self-sufficient and distant. Closed off and a little resentful. This manifests most keenly in his interactions with his brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), whose middle-age exuberance runs counter to Monk’s increasing exasperation.

Adapted from Percival Everett’s warmly received 2001 novel “Erasure” by writer/director Cord Jefferson, American Fiction boldly yet breezily takes on a lot. It’s a take down of empty-gesture tokenism within the publishing industry, savaging PR-motivated diversification and the gargantuan oversights that it breeds. It investigates latent racism in an environment preening to be seen as liberal and contemporary (via microaggressions or simple, gaping ignorance). Monk is our trailblazer, butting up against institutional incompetence and hypocrisy, but he isn’t absolved of his part in the cultural jigsaw puzzle either. Through his interactions with commercially successful author Sintara Gordon (Issa Rae), Jefferson challenges Monk’s snobbish gate-keeping, addressing questions of class and artistic value and need that weigh heavy in Monk’s argument.

There’s a curious almost meta-textual tension in the disparity between the film’s ‘plot’ shenanigans with Monk’s Stagg R. Leigh alter-ego (the source of plenty of comic material) and its more thoughtfully toned familial drama. The latter is the source of the more humanistic performances and interactions, and doesn’t much tessellate with the farcical routines taking place in board rooms and at award ceremonies. Jeffrey Wright – a longstanding gem of American cinema – is on fine form in both locales, but the under-sung MVP of American Fiction might be Erika Alexander as potential love interest across the road Coraline. Her presence anchors the human drama. Centres it. Tethers it, perhaps, to a register of responses that an audience might not otherwise have found left with only the film’s broader farce, some elements of which flatly don’t work. I love Keith David as much as anyone, but a sequence in which he embodies Monk’s imagined gangsta father figure sticks out awkwardly in the picture overall.

Like Monk dragging his hardbacks out of the African American Studies section into the body of a book store’s General Fiction section, Jefferson clearly aims for and deserves a fair share in the broader space of American cinema. The more novelistic drama feels like the world of Black American life that Monk would long for audiences to engage with fully. The irony is that American Fiction often feels distracted from this by its satirical sections, even as those explorations manifest many of its highlights. Its a schizophrenic picture, forever questioning its own identity much like its protagonist. Its a soul-searching piece of work; a minor mid-life crisis of a movie.

This makes the assured handling by Jefferson more impressive. American Fiction is such an easy, engaging watch that such effortlessness runs the risk of being taken for granted. And if the indecisive ending conjures memories of Lawrence Kasdan’s oft-derided 1990 ensemble drama Grand Canyon, it also has some of the wry energy of Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s brightest work, 2002’s comparably neurotic Adaptation.