American Fiction (2023 | USA | 117 minutes | Cord Jefferson)
Cord Jefferson’s wildly entertaining, and biting, satire American Fiction will probably make any white person who has ever taken a selfie with a Toni Morrison or bell hooks book at least a little squeamish. This movie deals with race, identity, agency, who has control over their own stories. It’s an absorbing movie that never feels heavy handed and has one of the most memorable lead characters I’ve seen in quite a while.
Jeffrey Wright is Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a well-respected author and professor whose book sales have been in decline for the past several years. His high-minded literary fiction is just not reaching the masses and publishers are reluctant to invest in another book that will offer middling sales at best.
Monk is such a rich character, perfectly cast. While his literary career flounders, his family life also falls into turmoil when his sister Lisa (Tracee Ross Ellis) suddenly dies and he has to assume the caretaker role for his mother falling into dementia. Monk also watches his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon, fall into a tailspin while coming to grips with his sexuality. He also finds a rival to be jealous of, another Black novelist, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae). He finds her prose underwhelming and thinks she caters her fiction to sell to white readers. One of her books is titled We Lives in Da Ghetto.
In a fit of frustration, Monk writes a cathartic novel under a nom de plume with as many Black stereotypes as he can think of and sends it off to his agent. Surprise, surprise, it’s a massive hit. Trying to pull the plug by upping the stakes until it becomes too unpalatable for the white people trying to shovel money at him only makes the matter worse and the book more popular. The publication of a book simply called Fuck by wanted fugitive Stagg R Leigh is the publishing event of the year. There’s an extremely funny scene where Monk, in character, meets with a film producer named Wiley (Adam Brody) who insists on meeting that Monk aborts mid-meal and that only causes Wiley to offer more money for the film rights.
Not every joke lands, naturally, but a clear majority hits its target. The script, adapted from a 2001 novel called Erasure by Percival Everett, astutely captures a moment where our culture seems to be saying that it wants stories from Black authors, but only on certain terms. If you look in the right places, the internet is full of stories of authors, particularly authors of color, being told by white publishing gatekeepers to stay in their lane and only write stories that lean into their identity, or pigeonhole the stories they are “allowed” to write. The examples are too numerous to list exhaustively.
One storyline has Monk and Sintara as judges for a prestigious literary prize with three white authors. It’ll surprise exactly no one with how the votes shake out. The white majority notes that their votes for Fuck are about listening to the voices of Black authors, while both Monk and Sintara protest.
Writing this review with so many superlatives made me feel a little self-conscious that I might be stepping into one of Jefferson’s traps laid out for well-meaning white liberals, but I’ve never recommended White Fragility to a single person, so my conscience is clear.
The gatekeepers in publishing are often patronizing, and ripe for satire, but the satire is only part of what makes this movie so compelling. The family drama that runs parallel to the comedy is well-written and well-acted across the board, and it felt authentic. Monk is losing control of his life while he becomes wealthy beyond his imagination. At one point, he goes into a bookstore and moves his own books from the Black authors section, but while his cause is righteous, he’s also aware it’s a futile gesture. The white bookseller tells him that he’ll move his books back after he leaves.
Cord Jefferson is a veteran TV writer with a lot of impressive credits, but he really hits it out of the park with his film debut. I can’t wait to see what he does next. This is one of my favorite movies I saw in 2023.
When everything inevitably collides in the final scene, I laughed to the point my sides hurt.
American Fiction opens in Seattle theaters on Friday, January 4.