American Fiction will initially have you thinking it’s going to take the piss out of a lot of people.
It opens with main character Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) — an embittered, not-so-successful author and college professor — kicking a white student out of his literature class because she’s offended that he wrote the N-word on his whiteboard. After being forced by his school to take some time off, Ellison heads back to Boston, his hometown, to visit family. He also attends a literary festival where he finds that white people are straight-up in love with We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a broken-English-filled novel written by a rising African American literary star (Issa Rae).
As a death in the family and other pressing issues force him to stay close to home and find ways to drum up money, a fed-up Ellison writes My Pafology, a blatantly ’hood melodrama he pens under the assumed name Stagg R. Leigh. Needless to say, the book (which Ellison retitles with a more profane one-word title) becomes a hit, attracting the attention of the lily-white literary elite and even a Hollywood producer (played by a rather oily Adam Brody).
Fiction is an amusing Trojan horse of a film. Journalist turned Emmy-winning TV writer Cord Jefferson (Master of None, Watchmen) uses his debut film to adapt Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a response to acclaimed “I’m Black, y’all” tomes like Sapphire’s Push (aka the novel that became the Oscar-winning misery train known as Precious). At first it seems like Fiction is gonna be balls-to-the-wall satire, taking shots at those who think Black folk are mostly stuck in the inner city, ducking bullets and baby mamas.
The movie mostly concentrates on Ellison and his middle-class upbringing. With the movie taking place predominantly in a beachside neighborhood — miles away from any concrete jungle — we see Ellison living and reconciling with his dysfunctional family, including his doctor sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), his mentally decaying mother (Leslie Uggams) and his coke-snorting, fresh-outta-the-closet brother (Sterling K. Brown). Jefferson practically suckers you into watching a movie about a Black man and his Black family where — apart from a scene Ellison creates between two characters as he’s writing — gunshots don’t ring out.
Every now and then, Fiction doles out chuckles by reminding you how goofy-ass white folks will eat up stories about Black folks scratching and surviving. Practically every white character here is a clueless idiot who thinks supporting gritty Black stories makes them an automatic ally. But I do wish the movie also took certain aspects of Black culture — my people — to task for embracing and propagating stereotypical Black tropes. Even though Black people have proven time and time again that we are not a monolith, there are still Black folk out there who, just like white people, believe that unless you came out the ’hood, your Black story isn’t that valid.
Nevertheless, Fiction does something long overdue: It gives Wright a very meaty lead turn. Ever since he hit the scene as Jean-Michel Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s biopic Basquiat, Wright has spent 25-plus years as one of the most versatile, reliable African American character actors working today. He’s been in everything from Wes Anderson movies to Daniel Craig-era James Bond films to HBO shows like Westworld and Boardwalk Empire, often stealing whole scenes from whatever star he’s supposed to support. (My favorite of Wright’s performances is Bill Murray’s amateur-detective neighbor in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.)
Fiction has Wright pretty much leading the whole charge. He’s a proud, frustrated, intelligent Black man trying to get his shit together personally and financially, and unfortunately pretends to be a thugged-out literary star in order to do that. He even gets a love interest (former Living Single cast member Erika Alexander), whom he has a hard time confiding in. Although American Fiction doesn’t go all-out with the merciless satire, it does show how Wright can carry a whole damn movie — and it would be nice if Hollywood remembered that in the future.
