American Fiction
Writer/director Cord Jefferson's satire
American Fiction is generating plenty of Oscar buzz. This writer's
verdict is that buzz is mostly deserved. It may not be in the top 5 for the
year, but it is a worthwhile film and it would be pleasing to see actors
Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown get nominations.
Wright is an admirable character actor who
has excelled in wildly different roles like 1999's underrated Ride With The
Devil and 2000's fun Shaft reboot (others might recognize him from
HBO's Westworld or as Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig James Bond
films). In American Fiction, he plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a
writer of highbrow fiction that gets little in the way of sales or critical
notice.
While Monk deals with a family tragedy,
his most recent effort is rejected by publishers and he witnesses the literary
success of Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae). Golden's acclaim rankles Monk because he
feels it traffics in stereotypes and flattens the African-American experience
to one of poverty and misery.
Faced with the costs of placing his
dementia-addled mother in a nursing home, Monk writes a book full of the
stereotypes he loathes and submits it to publishers under an alias as an act of
trolling/spite. However, they love it and Monk must deal with the fallout.
Wright's terrific in the lead, and
Brown is also excellent as Wright's gay brother. The film shifts back and forth
between being an affecting family drama and a satire of the publishing industry
and people who congratulate themselves for caring about minority representation
while ignoring minority opinions.
While the film is enjoyable overall,
the one flaw that stuck out was Jefferson setting the story in the present day.
American Fiction is based on a 2001 book called Erasure by
Percival Everett. The plot makes perfect sense in that era as the 1990s was the
decade of gangsta rap. It was the decade of movies like Boyz N The Hood,
Menace II Society, and New Jack City, as well as books like Push (which
would be made into the Oscar-winning film Precious). However, the books
by Black authors in bookstores today are not solely inner-city misery porn
(stop by a local bookstore to see for yourself) and the films made by Black
writers and directors are not limited to slavery or crime stories. American
Fiction would have been better off set at the time of the novel's release.
