Film review

Cord Jefferson (2023)

The trailer for American Fiction sets out the main story clearly.  Monk, a middle-aged African American, is a writer of serious literature with zero commercial appeal.  Frustrated by abysmal sales and dismayed by the success of a Black author whose new best-seller trades in Black stereotypes, Monk embarks on writing his own crowd-pleaser, in a spirit of angry sarcasm.  He types the title, ‘My Pathology’; after a moment’s thought, he replaces the ‘th’ with an ‘f’.  When his agent informs him that a publisher has accepted ‘My Pafology’, Monk is incredulous; when the book becomes a smash hit, he’s appalled.  Each time I saw the trailer in the cinema, I wondered how this strong comedy premise could be spun out to feature length (especially since it’s also clear from the trailer that representatives of the white publishing world will be getting cartoon treatment).  Now I know.  The material used by Cord Jefferson to expand the narrative to nearly two hours verges on an example of what American Fiction is meant to be satirising.

Jefferson is a well-known writer for American television; American Fiction is his first cinema screenplay as well as his directing debut.  The source material is a 2001 novel called Erasure by Percival Everett.  Like his creation Monk, (Professor) Percival Everett is an English scholar as well as a fiction writer.  Even if you’ve not read Erasure (I haven’t), the Wikipedia page delivers an instant impression of its cultural knowingness.  Everett’s protagonist’s full name is Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, who writes ‘My Pafology’ pseudonymously – as an Invisible Man.  Monk’s nom de plume, Stagg R Leigh, plays on the name of a legendary Black badass.  According to Wikipedia’s summary of Erasure, ‘My Pafology’ is ‘based in part on Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Sapphire’s Push (1996)’; Everett presumably sees the latter as epitomising ‘the late-1990s’ reality of the publishing industry seeming to pigeonhole black writers by valuing accounts of dysfunctional urban poor over other black lives’.

Monk Ellison’s phony novel is (Wikipedia again) ‘published in its entirety within Erasure and creates a meta-narrative that challenges the reader about the value and merits of this writing in contrast to the supposedly more erudite text and characters of Erasure’.  American Fiction can’t replicate this (a nice coincidence to see it just a week after bumping into Atonement again) but Jefferson takes from Percival Everett’s original the other elements mentioned above, and more.  While Push would become a 2009 film with a foolishly longer, self-aggrandising title (Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire), Monk Ellison tries to derail his book’s publication by insisting that ‘My Pafology’ be retitled ‘Fuck’ – or else the deal is off.  The publisher agrees, of course; ‘Fuck’ it is.  Jefferson also retains what one reviewer of Erasure would describe as a ‘moving portrait of a son coming to terms with his mother’s life’.  The Ellison family story, which accounts for much of the film’s screen time, is where American Fiction starts to go wrong.

The opening sequences are promising.  Monk (Jeffrey Wright), who teaches at a university in Los Angeles, crosses swords with one of the students in his seminar.  Like most of her classmates, Brittany (Skyler Wright) is white – as is the board on which Monk has written the names of Flannery O’Connor and one of her short stories, The Artificial Nigger.  When Brittany complains the class shouldn’t ‘have to stare at the N-word all day’, Monk patiently explains that ‘This is a class on the literature of the American South.  You’re going to encounter some archaic thoughts, coarse language, but we’re all adults here, and I think we can understand it in the context in which it’s used’.  When Brittany continues to protest, Monk tartly replies that ‘I got over it – I’m pretty sure you can, too’.  Her exit line – ‘Well, I don’t see why’ – is petulant but the scene is strong as well as funny because Skyler Wright shows Brittany as genuinely upset.  The next scene, in which the university authorities suspend Monk for this latest in a series of verbal indiscretions, is comically much cruder but it’s also necessary.  American Fiction is apparently set in the present day but you do wonder if the war of words in the seminar reflects a situation more likely at the time Percival Everett wrote Erasure than in the 2020s.  It seems improbable that Brittany would now be a lone complaining voice.  It’s believable that her teacher would now be disciplined for suggesting that she grow up.

The key episode at a literary festival in Boston – Monk’s home city, where he returns while on enforced sabbatical leave – isn’t subtle but makes its points effectively and amusingly.  Monk has just learned from his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), that his novel manuscript has come back from yet another publisher with regrets that the book, though ‘finely crafted, with fully developed characters and rich language’, lacks connection ‘with the African-American experience’.  Monk’s fiction does indeed sound off-puttingly academic:  this latest effort, ‘The Persians’, is a reworking of Aeschylus’s tragedy of that name.  At the literary festival, there’s a feeble turnout for a panel discussion on ‘Revitalizing Ancient Literature for the Modern Audience’ in which Monk takes part.  He learns that this session clashed with a Q&A with exciting new Black author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae).  He looks in on the Q&A to hear Sintara tell the fawning moderator (Nicole Kempskie) how she came to write her rapturously received novel ‘We’s Lives in Da Ghetto’.  When she reads an excerpt, Sintara gets a standing ovation from a full house.

By this point, Cord Jefferson has started to work in details of Monk’s middle-class family.  His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and his brother Cliff (Sterling K Brown) are both doctors.  Lisa works in Boston and, with the help of live-in housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), cares for the three siblings’ widowed mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who’s showing signs of dementia.  Plastic surgeon Cliff, like Monk, moved out west; he recently split from his wife, after she found him in bed with a man.  Lisa stays in the film long enough to reveal to Monk that their late father had affairs (with women); she then dies, suddenly and unexpectedly.  It soon emerges that Agnes needs to be in a care home and that Monk must raise funds for her care costs since Cliff won’t chip in.  It’s a perfectly good idea that Monk, when he sits down to write a book that will sell, is driven by this urgent practical imperative as well as by cynical fury – but there’s little further traction between the film’s satirical comedy and the routine domestic drama, of which plenty is still to come.  Monk embarks on a tentative romance with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a divorced lawyer whose house is on the same street as his mother’s.  Cliff hangs around in Boston, in Agnes’s beach house, having fun and doing drugs with a couple of younger men.  There’s a sentimental, sub-Peggotty-and-Barkis romance between Lorraine and a cab driver called Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas).

Monk’s agent Arthur evidently isn’t used to peddling trash:  each shot of his desk mysteriously displays a pile of copies of Alcools (as if Guillaume Apollinaire need worry about sales …).  When Arthur first receives ‘My Pafology’ he’s apprehensive about getting it read because it ‘scares me’.  Monk asks why:  ‘Because,’ says Arthur, ‘white people think they want the truth, but they don’t.  They just want to feel absolved’.   The runaway success of ‘My Pafology’/’Fuck’ vindicates Arthur:  a six-figure sum offered as a pre-emptive advance, a vastly more lucrative movie deal, eleventh-hour submission for a prestigious literary award.  The comic focus, of course, is on self-approving white liberal perceptions and reception of the book but the non-comic parts of the story offer white audiences the opportunity for another kind of complacency.  If the dramatis personae of American Fiction were white, their ordeals – bereavement, dementia, sexual identity, marriage breakdowns – would rightly be dismissed as items on a checklist.  Because the main characters are African-American, anxious white viewers are given an excuse to feel better about themselves:  look, the Black bourgeoisie is just like us!   There’s even a generic melancholy score (by Laura Karpman) to underline the point.  None of this would matter so much if Black audiences viewed the Ellison family and their dramatically tame travails as no less ridiculous than the film’s white personnel but this may not be the case – at least if the public reactions of some Black cineastes are anything to go by.  In a piece she contributed to Variety late last year, Gina Prince-Bythewood, director of The Woman King, admires American Fiction not only as ‘a searing indictment of biased norms’ but also as ‘a heartbreaking family drama … [with] characters who are flawed works of progress searching for peace within themselves, and with each other’.  You could say the same of characters in any self-respecting TV soap – if, that is, you’re as comfortable with silly hyperbole as Prince-Bythewood seems to be.

The shallowness of the film’s but-seriously side also detracts from Jeffrey Wright’s portrait of Monk, which is absorbing but always tantalising.  Wright certainly looks the academic part but I never got the hang of why Monk – bespectacled, urbane, a few pounds overweight – was so isolated and miserable in his personal life as well as thwarted in his creative endeavours.  The plot depends on his keeping secret from Coraline his latest writing venture but not necessarily his past or his feelings, yet he’s silent on all these subjects.  When they first meet, he’s gratified to learn she’s one of the few people who buy his high-falutin novels; when they fall out and break up, it’s because Coraline is a less discriminating reader than Monk thought – she enjoys ‘Fuck’, too.  Are we meant to think Monk is so preoccupied with being a successful novelist that he can’t form successful personal relationships?  If so, Jeffrey Wright doesn’t convey that impression.  He suggests someone more fundamentally, though opaquely, dissatisfied.  He also renders implausible what proves to be a crucial plot development.  Monk is invited to join the panel of judges for the major annual award given by the New England Book Association, which is anxious to improve its diversity profile.  When Monk demurs, the Association’s director tells him, ‘This will literally allow you to judge other writers for once’; quick as a flash, Monk replies, ‘I’m in’.  It’s a dumb joke on rabid rivalry among writers:  how did Monk think this panel would work other than by literally judging literature?  Wright’s interpretation of him ensures the joke rings all the more false.

Monk’s decision to judge is important for several reasons.  The panel’s first task is to rule on whether ‘Fuck’ can be admitted to the contest even though the nominating deadline has passed.  The book is rapidly becoming a cultural phenomenon and its author an intriguing and elusive new celebrity:  Stagg R Leigh, according to publishing hype, has previously done time inside and is now once more a fugitive from the law.  Trapped in his own tangled web, Monk argues in vain that ‘Fuck’ shouldn’t be eligible for consideration for the prize.  Each of the three whites on the five-strong panel is a crude caricature of a particular literary-political point of view; the other Black judge is Sintara Golden.  At the business end of judging, she and Monk are the minority voting against ‘Fuck’ for the award – an ironically amusing alliance that results from mixed motives:  Monk is full of contempt for what he has written and scared of being unmasked as the result of further public recognition; Sintara is irked that ‘Fuck’ is now upstaging ‘We’s Lives in Da Ghetto’.  In the panel’s discussion, she accuses Stagg R Leigh of ‘pandering’ to white preconceptions of non-white experience.  This is too much for Monk:  it’s the pot calling the kettle Black.  During the lunch break on judgment day, he catches Sintara alone and, taking pains not to give away too much, asks her to explain how it is that she wasn’t pandering.  Sintara explains herself in proudly self-justifying terms.  This well-written, well-played exchange is the best bit of American Fiction’s lampoon of literary amour propre and jealousy.  Like that opening sequence in the seminar room, comedy and urgency are held in tense balance.

Jeffrey Wright is at his best in these scenes; the lunchtime discussion also gives Issa Rae the chance to show another side to Sintara.  Most of the supporting roles are either underwritten (Coraline, Arthur) or one-note (Lorraine and Maynard, the white panel judges (Jenn Harris, Neal Lerner, Bates Wilder) and publishing people (Miriam Shor, Michael Cyril Creighton), Cliff’s beach-house paramours (Alexander Pobutsky, Joshua Olumide)).  Although Cliff isn’t part of the ‘Fuck’ story, his behaviour, unlike that of the other people in Monk’s private life, involves comic elements.  They’re mostly coarse and Cliff is a plastic surgeon for the sake of a single one-liner but Sterling K Brown’s verve livens things up considerably.  The brazenly unprincipled Hollywood producer Wiley Valdespino (Adam Brody) may be the most carelessly conceived character of all.  Arthur sets up a meeting with him, telling Monk that Wiley ‘specializes in Oscar-baity “issue” movies’.  It turns out his latest movie is, as Wiley explains, ‘about this white couple.  They get married on an old plantation in Louisiana and all the slave ghosts come back, and they murder everyone. … Ryan Reynolds gets decapitated with an Afro pick in the opening scene’.  That’s a weird idea of Oscar bait – ‘Plantation Annihilation’ (as it’s called) doesn’t sound nearly worthy enough.  Adam Brody does pretty well, even so, in Wiley’s first meeting with the man behind ‘Fuck’ – a meeting Monk attends in a rare appearance as his Stagg R Leigh alter ego, though he’s half-hearted in the part.  Stagg talks rough but surprises Wiley by asking for a glass of dry white wine.

American Fiction ends with a bang but, since it’s a meta bang, also a whimper.  When ‘Fuck’ is announced as the winner of the big literary prize, Monk goes to the stage and says he has a confession to make.  Cord Jefferson then cuts to Wiley telling Monk this won’t do as the climax to his screenplay for ‘Fuck’:  it leaves things up in the air.  Cut back to the ceremony:  this time, when the winner is announced, Monk exits and hotfoots it to Coraline’s house, to apologise to her.  Back to Wiley, who dismisses this as too much like romcom.  Monk tries again:  now armed white police, on the hunt for Stagg R Leigh, invade the ceremony and shoot him dead.  Perfect, says Wiley:  ‘Fuck’ will go into production.  As Cliff, belatedly in on Monk’s secret, drives his brother away from a studio backlot, Monk exchanges meaningful looks with an actor playing one of the plantation slaves in Wiley’s blaxploitation bloodbath.  By now, the racial point-making has elbowed the film’s supposedly realistic elements out of sight.  One upside to this is that the Ellison family drama etc has at long last been abandoned.  Another, from Cord Jefferson’s perspective, is that the point-making means American Fiction really is ‘Oscar-baity’ – with five nominations, including for Best Picture, to prove it.

15 February 2024