American Fiction (2023)

Score: 5 / 5

One of the most surprising releases of this awards season, American Fiction hit cinemas somewhat unceremoniously in wide release in January and I had no idea what it was. If you'll forgive some geeky waxing here, I was stunned to learn it is the film adaptation of Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett that was my favorite read in grad school. It's an extraordinarily complex and riotously funny examination of commercial and academic discourse around the publication, marketing, and consuming of Black literature in America. That it has taken this long to find new life is surprising; then again, public discussion of critical race theory and antiracist movements in the last decade surely helped "rediscover" this gem. And indeed it is timely, as the Academy finally honors Black filmmakers and large movements have been mobilized to subvert, counter, and ignore mass market demands for typical, expected, "safe" stories about Black people focused on slavery, reconstruction, and urban crime. This material, on the other hand, flips the script literally, relocating where Black life and Black art meet in our culture and critiquing the racist powers that keep both in check.

Jeffrey Wright leads one of the best movies of the year with an award-worthy performance as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a college professor and academic author whose published works aren't exactly lucrative. Increasingly frustrated by the designation of his works on "African-American literature" shelves in bookstores and in the minds of the masses, he is further incensed when a colleague Sintara Golden (Issa Rae playing a character based on Juanita Mae Jenkins in the source material) publishes a bestselling sensation based on crude stereotypes and what he perceives as poor writing: We's Lives in Da Ghetto. Deciding that if this is the kind of trash paying customers, pandering critics, and media personalities will buy and praise, he'll make his mark, Monk crafts a joke novel along the same lines -- mostly nonsensical, artificially melodramatic and criminal, knowingly stereotypical -- entitling it My Pafology. To his horror, it's also a smash hit, swiftly eliciting awards nominations and contracts for film rights.

Having published it under a pseudonym -- the tongue-in-cheek "Stagg R. Leigh," named for the mythic murderer -- that carries with it a criminal persona, Monk soon has to arrange anonymous interviews, hiding his face and altering his voice to sound more "hood" and dangerous while concealing his real identity. While his alter ego becomes the talk of the nation, Monk himself balances his new income with his simmering rage, at one point hilariously changing his title to simply Fuck in the hopes of having it finally blacklisted (so to speak), only to have it embraced by his white, elite publishers. Meanwhile, his private life takes some nasty turns when his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross) passes away, his brother (Sterling K. Brown) returns from his life of alcoholism, recreational drugs, and sexual abandon in the wake of his divorce, and their mother (Leslie Uggams) declines with Alzheimer's disease. These family woes exacerbate Monk's wrestle with identity, kinship, and belonging.

The weightier elements fortunately do not, in fact, weigh down the film. Screenwriter and director (in his debut!) Cord Jefferson deftly adapts the material into a fast-paced, intelligently hilarious roller coaster of emotions that provokes tears from laughter and sympathy. The family dynamics are the most real and raw, but not in a tragic way, despite their issues; the family's live-in housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) shines the brightest light into Monk's life and into the film, followed closely by his new girlfriend Coraline (Erika Alexander). Monk's journey -- his dubious pilgrim's progress -- would not be possible without the often breathtaking insight of these characters he brushes up against, who often also help us like Monk more. Because, rude and snobbish and stubborn as he is, he's not particularly likable, even though he's our conduit for learning through increasingly complex issues.