American Fiction

dir: Cord Jefferson

2023

American Fiction is a lot of film. I guess it’s lots of two lots; a lot of a family drama, and a lot of a satirical take on the state of, you guessed it, American literary fiction.

But really, what it is, is funny. It’s a pretty funny film. I got genuine laughs out of this flick, and it’s not billed as a comedy. I got more laughs out of this than No Hard Feelings, the recent Mean Girls update or even Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which had to have been a comedy, because otherwise…

In terms of its satirical components, its target is mainly well-meaning “white” liberals who through a mixture of condescension and egotistical imagined empathy end up being more racist towards African-Americans than even the dumbest red-hatted Trump voter. Right from the start as our main character is shown in class at the university where he lectures, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is being castigated by a student because of the presence of a certain word on the whiteboard.

They’re analysing the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. One of those short stories happens to be The Artificial N-----. Now, I don’t particularly love the word either, but it is the short story’s name. Thelonious is African-American, and a writer, and lecturer, and the student complaining, saying that even seeing the word causes her distress, is, for lack of a better descriptor, white. When she persists in her complaints, Thelonious tells her that he got over whatever trauma the word represents, so she could too.

Naturally, she wants to have a word with his manager, being the Karen-in-training that she is, and complains to the university hierarchy. She - let’s not gloss over this, took offence on behalf of African-Americans, including the ones in her class, including her lecturer - when they themselves in that context weren’t offended.

Still, because this world is topsy-turvy, her complaint is taken seriously, and Monk is encouraged to go away, over to Boston, to attend some book festival where no-one know who he is.

See, Monk is African-American, and a writer and an intellectual who writes historical stuff or books on mythology etc. But he is seen as an African-American first and foremost, rather than as a writer or intellectual. So if he writes something, the assumption from the publishing / bookseller world is that his books must belong and be put into the “ghetto” of African-American studies, and not what their actual subject is.

It’s a point he tries to push with a clerk at a big chain book store, but the kid has no idea who Monk is, and tells him no matter where Monk tries to put his books, they’re just going to have to put them back.

“You’re just following orders” intones Monk, in that deep baritone Jeffrey Wright is celebrated for. Oh, and for being a fine actor, one of the finest. The character he plays here is smart, precise, funny, but also a bit of a prick. It extends to all his interactions with people, especially with family, who he is forced to interact with on his sabbatical.

He first meets with his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), who he hasn’t seen for a while, and she’s as brilliant and acerbic as he is, if not more so. She is making up for lost time by knifing him for his manner, and for longstanding beefs both of them have given their relative positions in the family. She is an absolute delight.

People not from families with multiple siblings might not get it, but there are dynamics at play that get repeated, sometimes, across the world. The firstborn, the eldest, is closest aligned with the parents, or one of the parents, in this case their apparent ogre of a father. All the focus of the parent(s) is on the golden high achieving firstborn, with little left over for the other two, who bond together with their shared resentment of a) the firstborn who gets all the attention, and b) resentment of the parents for not seeing them as who they are.

There’s another sibling, being Cliff (the always great Sterling K. Brown), who’s also not a big fan of Monk’s, but he’s got other problems on his mind. Like Lisa, he’s recently been divorced, but for very different reasons, mostly being he’s only lately realised that he very much prefers the company of men as opposed to women.

And I don’t mean for cigar-based poker nights and watching sportsball on the television.

Cliff also dislikes Monk, but then they haven’t really seen each other for nearly a decade. Life passes by so quick when you’re resentful.

This flick isn’t really interested in resolving things, or bringing up old traumas and wounds in order to heal them through arguments or catharsis. These people are too old for any of that, and too cynical.

And in other films what would unite them is a shared concern for their mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who seems to be declining rapidly due to dementia or some variation thereof. But that’s not this flick. The question of how they’re going to look after Agnes in her dotage is not addressed in any meaningful way. Monk and Cliff fight about it, but Cliff is way too busy doing cocaine and drilling twinks in order to make up for lost time, and Monk doesn’t really have the money to pay for things anyway.

There is an unspoken aspect of the story that runs very much in parallel to the aspects of the film that satirise the publishing world. Monk and his family have, not only compared to African-Americans in general, but Americans in general, incredible wealth. Their father was an OB/GYN, and a very well recompensed one at that, so they have a home in Boston as well as a beach house at Sandy Hills. All three kids worked hard and are doctors “not – that – kind of Doctor” says Monk on a few occasions, but the other two, Lisa and Cliff, are actual doctors, like their dear old dad, who has been dear old dead for a while now, from a self-inflicted gun wound.

So part of the flick, the part least mentioned, is how this affluent and successful family now finds itself teetering on the edge of decline, of falling down a class or two, of downward mobility. There’s a tension there, because this family take a lot for granted, but let’s be honest, no-one’s talking about food stamps or food banks or missing meals or anything like that.

It’s just an added pressure, but it’s one that at least pressures Monk once he takes a certain course of action which snowballs out of his control.

At the book festival he went to towards the start of the film, his talk was attended by about five people. No-one knows or cares who he is. The big draw at the festival, packing out a conference room, is Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), with her novel We’s Lives in the Ghetto.

She is a bestseller. Her book is flying off the shelves. Filled as it is with tales of black poverty and cycles of violence, written in the vernacular, it’s what publishers want and what audiences want.

So disgusted by this is Monk that out of disgust, out of a wish to call attention to the fact that this is so fucked up, he sets out to deliberately write something meant to be a parody of this mentality.

He types to call it My Pathology, and then changes his mind, changing it to My Pafology, to match the illiteracy of the supposed narrator and author, a Mr Stagg R Lee.

And when his agent submits it to publishers who previously knocked back Monk’s stuff, the (white) publishers start salivating, proposing six figure advances and potential Hollywood movie rights sales in the millions. Just because it conforms to what they think of as the “authentic” Black experience.

Monk is incensed by all of this, and yet can’t stop the train, because it’s also the only way to keep his mother in the luxury that she has become accustomed to, but also, more importantly, it means he doesn’t have to look after her either, freeing him up to take more phonecalls with (white) publishers where he has to pretend to be some school of hard knocks sociopathic street hood.

Those scenes, which cast these mavens of the publishing world, and, eventually, when a Hollywood producer comes calling, called Wiley (Adam Brody), are so on the nose and abrasive that it’s either high comedy or the lowest of low hanging fruit, I can’t decide yet. They are shamelessly lampooned, and it’s almost too much.

Eventually, in a moment even higher irony, when Monk and Sintara have been put on a panel of judges to judge the year’s literary output, and Monk’s book (by this stage re-titled to Fuck, at Monk’s insistence, thinking that somehow that would prevent publication, which it does not do, if anything it makes it go viral). Both Monk and Sintara don’t support the book, saying it’s pat and simplistic, but the other three (white) judges make a statement about listening to the African-American community and reaching the most diverse outcome they could by celebrating Stagg R Lee’s debut.

And yet to do so they have to ignore the input of the two African-American people on the panel.

It’s just too rich. I think the flick does well to balance the literary parodic stuff with the family stuff and the burgeoning relationship he has with a beach house neighbour called Coraline (Erika Alexander), but it’s all deliberately messy without being farcical.

Everyone gives pitch perfect performances in this, but none of it would work if Jeffrey Wright was anything less than perfect throughout, which he is. He is both the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, seeing what no-one else sees in the absurdities of how well-meaning literary and liberal types enforce an inaccurate and incomplete view of Black people onto their readers, but he runs the risk of being too much of an arsehole for people to listen to, which is a perfect balance.

If you’re going to scream that the Emperor’s not wearing clothes, people aren’t going to listen if you’re naked as well.

And of course there’s the delicious irony that Monk has a falling out with Coraline, mostly because she got to read a copy of Fuck, but worst of all because she enjoyed the book.

And of course there’s the even more delicious irony that only by selling out, effectively, does Monk get to achieve the success and fame that has always eluded him. What a way to make you question all of your life’s choices.

There were so many scenes that made me laugh out loud with how well they were written and delivered, but the one that made me laugh the most involves a phone conversation between Cliff and Monk, where Cliff melodramatically announces that he has “taken a lover”, to which Monk expresses offence. Cliff accuses him of being homophobic, but Monk assures him he’s not offended that Cliff’s taken a lover, he’s offended that Cliff would use a phrase as ugly as “I Have Taken a Lover!”

Cliff doesn’t care though, as he hangs up, and starts getting handsy offscreen.

I think the satire is too ridiculous and events end up being way too convenient to really be that biting, but it’s of a piece with the rest of it, and the rest of it is more relatable human drama. I really enjoyed all elements of the story, and I wasn’t offended that the flick practically has too many endings or not a definitive one. It’s called American Fiction after all.

Did we think we were watching a documentary? About life on the streets?

8 times the Oscar Cillian Murphy is going to get should have been cut in half, with one half given to Paul Giamatti, and the other to Jeffrey Wright if there was any justice in this universe out of 10

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“Not being able to relate to people isn't a badge of honour.” – ouch, that one actually hurt - American Fiction