American Fiction review – incisive literary satire takes no prisoners

With American Fiction, Cord Jefferson crafts a hilarious and withering satire about an African American novelist chafing against an industry that limits Black storytelling to trauma and poverty narratives.

You know the kind of movies that American Fiction is responding to. Consider the civil rights and slavery dramas rushed out in the past decade after the rise of social movements like #BlackLivesMatters and #OscarsSoWhite or the wave of genre fare like Queen & Slim or Amazon’s horror series Them that are propped up as topical and important, because they peddle traumatic violence and give white liberals an avenue to feel absolved for having endured and empathized with such suffering.

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The problem with making a movie as a response to the industry’s limitations, is that the the movie itself can feel limited to its very narrow intention. Jefferson, a TV writer on Succession and Master of None, acquits himself splendidly. His feature debut feels like Jordan Peele snuck a bottle of pepper sauce into Alexander Payne’s Thanksgiving dinner. American Fiction is brimming with snappy, incisive banter and gags that a masterful ensemble cast led by Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K Brown and Tracee Ellis Ross make a meal out.

Jefferson adapts Percy Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, weaving its parodic take on media, which is sadly just as relevant today, into a thorny existential character drama about a writer who feels unseen and yet never makes himself vulnerable enough for people to truly see him. Wright is note-perfect as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. He’s the professor who pulls a Bamboozled by cynically writing a novel so filled with pandering cliches and tropes about Black struggle that salivating white gatekeepers line up to make it a sensational hit. The success does little to alter Monk’s disgruntled and bewildered state.

Jefferson’s film is wisely as critical of Monk as it is of the society the author is railing against. There’s a strain of self-hate in the character, who is regularly ridiculed for his taste for white wine and white women. Monk, an academic whose upper-middle class family has a beach home, is the type who responds to a lifetime defined by his skin colour by doing everything he can to distance himself from what society sees as Black.

He copes with micro-aggressions in the office and on the street while insisting in the most blatant self-delusional ways that he doesn’t believe in race. He bristles when one of his early novels is placed in a book store’s African American section, admonishing the clerk saying that the only thing Black about it is the ink.

What sends Monk into a tizzy is seeing a best-selling novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto celebrated by the literary establishment for its Precious-like storytelling. He attends a panel where the author Sintara Golden, played generously by Issa Rae in a genius stroke of casting, is code-switching to entertain her mostly white audience. On a lark, Monk writes his own hood novel, under a pseudonym, with scenes that would snuggly fit into the 50 Cent movie Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (which, the author catches on cable earlier). He doesn’t expect the flippant stunt to actually attract more dollars than he’s ever seen in his life, cash he begrudgingly accepts to afford a nursing home for his ailing mother (Leslie Uggams). That’s motivation enough for Monk to take the charade further, pretending to be a hardened fugitive from the law for white publishers and a movie producer who uncritically eat up all the bait he sets up for them.

The movie almost gets away from Jefferson during these moments that are outrageously funny to a fault, as actors like Adam Brody (playing the Hollywood producer) knowingly play up the industry’s ignorance and craven exploitation of marginalized voices to the point of parody. The festival audience was howling, likely because few feel implicated in such interactions. No one there sounded as uncomfortable as the college student in American Fiction’s brilliant cold-open. The young woman is so bothered by Monk teaching Flannery O’Connor’s confrontational short story The Artificial N***** that she storms out.

Making entertainment that criticizes entertainment is tricky. It’s too easy to fall prey to your own booby-trapped gotcha moments, and feed the very tastes you seek to hold to a higher standard. Jefferson finds clever, fourth wall breaking avenues to acknowledge that there really is no winning in situations like this – there’s also no Oscars for making an audience storm out.

His movie is kept grounded by the family melodrama, the alternately warm and testy interactions between Monk and his siblings (Ross and Brown) that I could have had so much more of. It’s in these moments that the Black characters get away from how the world sees them and can instead focus on how they see themselves.

• American Fiction is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year