A writer creates a drunken joke that wins wide acclaim in American Fiction.
Fun note: that’s also kind of the plot to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and American Fiction also shares some structural similarities with Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and both those things make me love this movie even more.
We meet author Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), called Monk by nearly everybody, as he tangles with a college student (who is white) in the class he’s teaching over assigned readings that use racial epithets. It’s literature of the American South, his prickly explanation goes, if he can get over it so can she. She leaves the class in tears and Monk is called into a meeting with various deans where it’s explained that maybe he should take some mandatory time off. He heads to a book festival in Boston where he finds himself on panel discussion with an audience that could be generously described as a “smattering” of people. He learns his panel is at the same time as an event featuring Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose book We’s Lives in Da Ghetto is the hot book of the moment. It’s gritty and real and honest and raw, says everybody. To Monk, it’s a crass money grab by Golden, an Oberlin graduate who works in publishing, who is just feeding white editors and white readers a stereotype of Black life.
Monk’s life frustrations continue as he spends time with his family: his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is a busy doctor still recovering financially from her divorce and caring for their widowed mother Agnes (Leslie Uggums), who lives in the family home with longtime housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor). Lisa tries to explain that Monk and brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), who lives in Tucson (Monk lives in L.A.), haven’t been home enough to realize that their mom seems to be fading in terms of her memory and possibly her ability to live alone. When Lisa suddenly dies, Monk finds himself basically out of work and dealing with a mother who possibly needs very expensive care. With Lisa gone, Clifford struggling after his own divorce and Monk not receiving money, his only hope is his recent book, which agent Arthur (John Ortiz) is struggling to find a publisher for. It’s not “Black enough,” is what Arthur says he’s being told by the publishers, despite Monk’s arguments that he is Black and these are his stories.
Thus does a beleaguered Monk get drunk and get writing. He pens a story called My Pafology (after starting with “My Pathology”) full of every stereotype and flat depiction of hacky portrayals of African American life he can think of, with bad dialogue we see his characters work out in front of him. He jokingly sends it to Arthur and later tells him to send it around as something between a prank and a protest over what publishers seem to think constitutes “Black stories.” Except, of course, a publisher loves it, offers him more money than he’s ever been paid before for a book and quickly there’s talk of a film.
While the book by “Stagg R. Leigh” (Monk’s pen name for his prank) is receiving increasing acclaim (and even FBI interest because Arthur decides on the fly that “Stagg” is a criminal on the run), an ill-at-ease Monk is trying to find the nicest possible assisted living facility for his mom. He’s not delighted that cheeseball producer Wiley Valdespino (just a perfect Adam Brody) is looking to make a movie of his book but he also isn’t in a position to turn down an offer that includes the word “million.”
Of course the horrible thing is going to be the thing that hits — The Producers and 30+ years of the internet have taught us all this — but American Fiction tells this story through the lens of Monk’s late middle-age frustrations at all the things that have not worked out. Monk is funny like a sad three-legged dog, is how Clifford describes him to Coraline (Erika Alexander), the woman Monk starts dating. Jeffrey Wright perfectly captures this, sort of the quality of a guy tangled up in his own sweater and not able to fight his way out. He tries to operate as somebody on a higher plane, somebody who doesn’t see race (as he explains while not getting a cab that instead stops for the white guy half a block away) and doesn’t tolerate Gen Z discomfort. But he is also delightfully petty (attempting to move his books in a chain bookstore and getting into a fight with a college colleague about the quality of the colleague’s “airport novels”) and, as his family points out, is more emotionally detached than evolved. Even his frustrations with Sintara, who he eventually sits on a judging panel with, seem to have as much to do with the fact that she’s successful (and at such a young age, comparatively) as with his feelings about how she found that success.
The comedy of American Fiction is, of course, fun and has its laugh-out-loud moments. But the movie also has a lot of truly poignant little bits about family — the way Monk relates to his siblings, the way the family is still operating with the memory of their father who died years earlier, what it means to become a parent’s caretaker. And it’s all delivered via one killer performance after another. Wright and Brown both received Oscar nominations (for actor and supporting actor, respectively; the movie is also nominated for adapted screenplay and best picture) but Tracee Ellis Ross and even smaller roles, like Keith David’s appearance as a character Monk conjures up for his book, hit their notes just right. A
Rated R for language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson (and based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett), American Fiction is an hour and 57 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures & Orion Releasing.
Featured photo: American Fiction.
