American Fiction is a 2023 comedy-drama following a novelist stuck in a financial rut who decides to mockingly lean into what sells by creating a new book that does just that, to his surprise and dislike.
Successful works aren’t necessarily quality ones. Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is frustrated. A full-time novelist and part-time professor, the California-based Monk has found success before writing about the Black experience in a way that he feels respects and honors his community. That’s all well and good, but that doesn’t drive book sales, especially in this climate. His stories aren’t deemed “black enough.” Monk is taken aback when seeing the commercial—and critical—success of “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto” the new novel from author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) that perpetuates Black struggle stories and exaggerates stereotypes.
Monk returns home to Boston to clear his head and spend time with family, including sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown). An unfortunate event binds Monk to the east coast for a while, and by consequence, his need for money grows. Needing to produce a novel quickly, he leans into what he disdains with “My Pafology,” sending the book to his agent (John Ortiz) under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Lee.” Written unseriously, ironically, the publishers want to buy and position this book in the market hard, and every effort Monk makes to pull the plug on his newfound success only pushes his newfound success into a higher stratosphere.
American Fiction is very much its own unique feature, but two other films come to mind as it pertains to their approaches and similar subject matter the more I watched. One is Dope, a genre-hodgepodge taking influence and inspiration from 90’s inner-city movies focusing on identity and environment. The other is Sorry to Bother You, which used race and code switching as an ignition switch to a larger, surrealist story on capitalism and the American workforce. Akin to these films, American Fiction is interested in analyzing a lot (albeit under one specific lens), and while it’s not always the smoothest congruence from scene to scene, at its best moments it’s one of the better experiences of the year.
Similar to how Sorry to Bother You was helmed by a debut director in Boots Riley, so too is American Fiction, putting Cord Jefferson behind the director’s chair for the first time. This isn’t so much a movie that lends itself to a visual tour-de-force (two fantastical story-within-the-story scenes are pulled off seamlessly though), but sometimes the best course of visual action is to let your talented lead person cook and let them drive the movie. One can see influences from both Spike Lee and Robert Altman. A subdued, jazzy score from composer Laura Karpman plays well, particularly during the idiosyncratic book publishing moments which tend to be where most of the comedy arises from.
Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action, there is said to be an equal and opposite reaction. Post Memorial Day 2020 and the George Floyd tragedy, the immediate reaction was placing more emphasis on lifting black voices, and this could be seen on websites like LinkedIn, or even your favorite streaming app, with the goal being to bring awareness and celebration to stories and experiences from African Americans. But what gets highlighted? Well, in business, it’s the thing that makes the most money and brings the most eyeballs.
Adapted from an early 2000’s novel in Erasure authored by Percival Everett, American Fiction—also written by Jefferson, is rather timely now, and while its industry of focus is acutely on publishing, its analysis on how Blacks have to juggle monetary reward versus artistic integrity is applicable to many of them. What good is spotlighting the Black experience if there’s only a certain type of it people want to read and hear about? Jefferson strikes a, well, nearly perfect pitch cord of scaling satire and he seems to instinctively know when it’s time to ratchet up the absurdity to drive home a point, and tamp it down to let it linger.
I think the biggest issue with his screenplay and the movie at large is that it’s not predominantly a societal satire, but equal parts of that and a dysfunctional family drama. The underlying point that Jefferson is making with the drama is pretty clear (to this viewer at least); no one person’s story is reflective of an entire race. Totally accurate, yet as the runtime progresses, Jefferson and the movie don’t seem to have the greatest sense of how the journey/awakening of Monk wraps into his authored story of My Pafology, nor does the movie have an idea of how it wants to end—literally. As such, it’s hard not to feel kind of flat at the conclusion of American Fiction.
What won’t leave viewers flat is the performance of Wright, a lock nominee for the Best Actor award. It’s work that allows the wide-ranged actor to tap into multiple ends of his skillset, from somber and self-examining to intentionally irascible with sidesplitting snark. This is a sneaky big ensemble cast; not specifically in A-list names, but names that almost always put in great work no matter the size of their role, whether that be Brown, Ross, Rae, or perennial supporting talents like Erika Alexander, Adam Brody, and Ortiz, the latter using Johnnie Walker labels to create a hilarious simile to what people want.
Even if the execution in spots is fragmented and not fully formed, American Fiction is an impressive first feature from Jefferson adapting something carrying a high degree of difficulty, with an all-encompassing effort by Wright. It’s easy to imagine more film collaborations in the futures of these two, whether fictional fare or more factual in nature.