American Fiction (2023)
dir. Cord Jefferson
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Amazon MGM Studios
Never underestimate the power of saying something old in a fresh, new way. With his feature film debut American Fiction, writer and director Cord Jefferson is standing on the shoulders of giants – namely Robert Townsend and Spike Lee’s – with his biting satire about what kinds of Black stories interest white audiences. And while the satire might be razor sharp, Jefferson simultaneously offers up a slice-of-life story about a man coming to terms with his imperfect family, how they’ve shaped him into an imperfect person, and how he’s helped with that project himself.
American Fiction is based on author Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. The story concerns a Black writer named Thelonious Ellison, who goes by the nickname Monk. (Bonus points to Jefferson for assuming his audience is smart enough to know why Monk is a fitting nickname for Thelonious.) Monk is frustrated with his stalling career as a novelist because he writes erudite, complex stories that no no publisher is interested in acquiring.
Monk’s latest book is being rejected by publishers, his agent tells him, because they want a “Black book.”
“They have a Black book. I’m Black, and it’s my book,” Monk tells his agent after hearing the bad news. His latest effort, the publisher’s rejection reads, is finely crafted with rich language, but they wonder what this reimagining of Aeschylus’s The Persians has to do with “the African-American experience.”
A forced leave-of-absence from his university teaching job – in a banger of an opening sequence, Monk clashes with a white student who is upset about the use of the N-word in material for the class (“With all due respect, Brittany, I got over it, I’m pretty sure you can too.”) – sees Monk heading to Boston to visit his family.
Jefferson’s screenplay handles the nuance of familial dynamics with a soft, heartfelt touch. The relationship between Monk and his sister, Lisa, is wonderfully indicative of the filmmaker’s approach. On the ride from the airport, the two siblings are talking about the relative merits of their respective career paths. Lisa is a doctor who provides abortion care. She frets about having to walk through a metal detector every day at her job.
Monk assures her that the work she is doing is important, as opposed to his, which Monk describes as inventing people in his mind and forcing them to have conversations with each other.
Lisa encourages her brother, telling him that books change people’s lives every day. When he asks his sister if anything he’s ever written has changed her life, Lisa responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. She had a wobbly dining room table once, and one of Monk’s books fit perfectly, she jokes.
This tiny moment, which lasts mere seconds within the movie, sets a solid foundation for this life-long relationship. That makes it easier for the audience to conjure the decades of history these two characters share. The same can be said for the dynamics between the two and their other sibling, Cliff, who has recently divorced his wife and come out of the closet as a gay man.
The incredibly talented actors bringing these people to life work in harmony with the understated, nuanced dialog to create fully formed characters. The inimitable Jeffrey Wright – I’ve been a fan since discovering Wright in Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 dramedy Broken Flowers – gives a palpable weight to each and every one of Monk’s slide-glances and miniscule hesitations before speaking. Wright is a master at injecting gravitas and meaning into the characters he portrays. His work in American Fiction is no exception. (A fellow actor, Ayo Edebiri, nailed it when she commented in her Letterboxd review for the movie that “[c]apturing Jeffrey Wright trying to eat an olive is one of the reasons the camera was invented[.]” I can attest to the truth of that statement.
The talented Tracee Ellis Ross, mostly known for her work in television on the shows Girlfriends, Black-ish, and Grown-ish, does a lot with only a few minutes of screentime as Lisa. Ross plays the character as a force of nature. It’s easy to see Lisa as a fully-formed person, although we have to mostly imagine that vibrant life off-screen. The same is true for Sterling K. Brown’s turn as Cliff. Brown, who typically brings intensity to each role he embodies, does exactly that for Cliff, but with the soft underbelly of humor that Jefferson injects into his screenplay.
I knew I was in good hands with Cord Jefferson due to his résumé. After serving as an editor at the website Gawker until it’s untimely 2016 demise, Jefferson has been involved in some of the most exciting American television projects of the 21st century. He wore multiple creative hats for my beloved The Good Place, with writer, story editor, or co-producer credits on 25 episodes in that show’s four season run. He also served as a consultant on ten episodes of HBO’s Succession and was the writer or story editor on the incendiary HBO reimagining of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s seminal graphic novel Watchmen.
What impressed me most about Jefferson’s adaptation of American Fiction was its restraint with the satire, which allows the movie to focus on the full breadth of the main character’s life. That is, in fact, exactly what Monk is arguing for. As I watched it, I could imagine an alternate version of American Fiction that gets as outrageous as the movies from the two filmmakers I mentioned at the top of the review. Instead, the filmmaker opted for a more humanistic approach.
Spike Lee’s 2000 flop Bamboozled – which I will note might have been a financial bomb, but was selected in 2023 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" – also deals with a Black man in the entertainment business who chafes at what white America wants from Black artists. I must admit that I have yet to catch up with Bamboozled – it’s been on my to-do list for years – but from what I understand, Lee ratchets up the satire to eleven.
Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend’s 1987 breakout – which Townsend wrote, directed, produced, and starred in – is a vicious and hilarious satire of Tinseltown. It uses outlandish (and very funny) fantasy sequences to draw a fat, red circle around the distasteful roles and opportunities that Black creators are given by white power players in Hollywood. (I was overjoyed to see Townsend on screen again in a few fleeting cameo appearances in the wonderful FX series The Bear.)
In the final seconds of American Fiction, Jefferson leaves Monk looking at a visual rhyme of a key sequence in Hollywood Shuffle. A Black actor is waiting for his call time in full costume, and he gives Monk a wave. The costume insinuates that the actor is portraying an enslaved person in the antebellum South. It’s the same tired, flattened representation of the Black experience as perpetual suffering for the enjoyment of white audiences that Monk has spent the movie railing against. If you’re familiar with Hollywood Shuffle, this visual reference will bring to mind the extended “Black Acting School” fantasy sequence in Townsend’s picture.
In American Fiction, Monk has the devilish idea to bend to market forces and produce the kind of “Black book” for which the white publishing world salivates. He takes his inspiration from the most popular Black novel currently on the scene: We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Sintara Golden, the current toast of the literary world.
It would have been easy for Jefferson to rachet up the ever-growing machinations that Monk puts himself through once his book, My Pafology – a change from the original title My Pathology, and which he eventually changes again to a much more salacious title in a vain attempt to make this little project too ridiculous to be taken seriously – becomes a runaway success.
Instead, the director decided to focus on smaller moments, moments between a mother and a son, a group of siblings, a nascent love affair, and moments that make Monk question his own values and assumptions. It’s a story that soars on its humanity, even while making myriad shrewd and cutting observations about society, entertainment, and who decides what’s valued in the stories we tell.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Cord Jefferson beautifully marries the personal and the political (which are, as the axiom states, one and the same) to craft a heartfelt and very funny story.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There’s a great little inside joke that helps the movie solidify the relationship between the three siblings. Monk’s brother and sister both tease him with a childhood nickname: Detective Dictionary.
- I loved seeing Erika Alexander, from The Cosby Show and Get Out, as Monk’s love interest in the movie. Her character, Coraline, doesn’t suffer nonsense lightly, even when it’s coming from Monk.
- The most inspired bit of fantasy within American Fiction comes when we see Monk writing the book that will get him into so much trouble. As he sits at his laptop writing, the characters he is imagining in his head materialize in his workspace to deliver the dialog he’s crafting. The great Keith David gets a quick cameo as the father figure in Monk’s opus.
- “I’m not bothered by the fact that you’re taking a lover, I’m bothered by the fact that you call it ‘taking a lover.’” I laughed very hard at this.
- The white judges on the panel that Monk is invited to join to decide on the winner of a literary award are all pitch-perfect send-ups of the “good white liberal.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- American Fiction is currently playing in theaters. I saw it via a FYC awards screener disc.