Illustration by Michael DiMilo
True Stories: Film Review of American Fiction
The buzzwords inclusion and diversity are common these days. Through DEI and other programs, they have been touted as necessary tools to establish cultural equity, yet racial stereotyping, cultural expectations, and insipidly clueless racism continue. They are everywhere.
The film American Fiction delves into issues of inclusion, stereotyping, and white guilt masquerading as hipness by dissecting them slowly and meticulously with a razor-sharp satirical blade. Like most good satire, the story is simultaneously hilarious and painful—seeing ourselves in the mirror usually is.
Writer and college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) has not been able to publish a book in some time. His agent Arthur (John Ortiz) commiserates, telling him his books garner critical praise, but are not “black” enough to sell. Sent on a forced leave from his university for confronting students on race issues—evidence of his militant colorblindness—Monk goes to a literary seminar in his childhood home Boston where he happens upon a packed forum featuring author Sintara Golden’s (Issa Rae) bestselling hit We’s Live in Da Ghetto, which he considers as offensive trash full of demeaning stereotypes.
Monk visits his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor, and his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who is starting to show signs of dementia. Faced with these family difficulties, Monk reaches out to his estranged brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), for moral and financial support. Cliff, however, whose wife divorced him after discovering him in bed with his gay lover, is an emotional (and financial) basket case. Both Lisa and Cliff confront Monk about his aloofness and estrangement from the family, saying that he pushes everyone away, much as their father did.
Monk happens to meet a neighbor Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer, and they begin a romantic relationship. He and Cliff send their mother to a retirement community, where does not adapt very well. Cliff tells Monk he is like their father, who was also aloof and distant. He also tells Monk Lisa had told him she saw their father kissing a white woman.
Fed up with his professional stagnation, Monk sits down and decides to write a parody of a “black” novel called My Pafology with the pen name of Stagg R. Lee, forcing his agent Arthur to send it out to prospective publishers as a joke. To his surprise—and Arthur’s amazement—Monk is offered a $750,000 advance for publication by a large New York publishing house.
Arthur convinces Monk to play along and during a phone conference to the publisher, he says that Stagg R. Lee is a fugitive on the run from the authorities, piquing the interest of Wily (Adam Brody), a Hollywood producer. As the buzz around the novel increases and it appears that it will become a bestseller, Monk decides to put an end to it. He calls the publishers, telling them he wants to change the title to F***, sure that they will decline. To his surprise, they accept, and the novel becomes even more popular.
Monk agrees to be a judge on a panel to pick the New England Book Association’s Literary Award and discovers Arthur has submitted F*** for the award. He also discovers Sintara Golden is also on the panel and is surprised to learn she shares many of his views on literature, diversity, and race. Despite Monk and Golden’s protests, F*** wins the award.
The film finally takes a completely unexpected turn at its conclusion, turning the concepts of fiction, inclusion, and race on their heads.
With its combinations of black comedy, biting satire, and gently sympathetic pathos, American Fiction forces the difficult questions of inclusion, institutional racism, commercialism, and political correctness into the spotlight. It is simultaneously a greatly entertaining and a brutally incisive work of cinema. Cord Jefferson’s screenplay, based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, deftly walks the line between the insipidity of modern culture and the delicate and painful sensibilities of family relations. The publishing industry, along with American tastemakers, are presented as creators of a new sort of commercialized pablum, a limousine liberal type of idiocracy. Cord also pulls no punches when it comes to the gushing embrace of white liberalism. The desperate urgency of white readers to embrace stories of genuine ghetto life (as written by middle-class black authors) is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic.
Alongside this cutting satire, however, is a delicately rendered portrait of an alienated man—named Monk—trying to deal with his fractured family relationships. Monk is steeped in the bitter ironies of his life; he is a consciously colorblind academic constantly confronted with white liberalism. He is a writer—a communicator—whose meticulously crafted fiction is underappreciated while badly written and formulaic novels sell like crazy. He is a man who cannot enjoy the very relationships he writes about.
Near the beginning of the film, a white student objects to the title of the Flannery O’Connor short story, “The Artificial Nigger” on Monk’s blackboard, saying it deeply offends her. Monk explains that the term is the product of the culture that produced it—along with Ms. O’Connor. The student still objects. Monk shrugs and says, “Well, I got over it.” which leads the student to leave and ultimately forces Monk to go on leave.
Monk’s belief that the quality of work should be divorced from any racial implication is idealistically naïve and hopelessly outmoded. His colorblindness is an anachronism; yet despite himself, he writes the sort of novel he despises. Even as a gesture of contempt, he finds the stereotypical black characters within himself.
There is a scene, during which Monk is writing My Pafology, in which characters from the novel suddenly appear in his study, mouthing his dialogue and acting out his story. A son accuses his father of not loving him, leaving him alone, leading him to a life of crime, and so forth…. The son ends up shooting his dad, who looks to Monk and asks why he did that. Monk simply shrugs.
This scene seems a little out of place in a narrative that was—so far—a realistic story. It begs the question of why Cord Jefferson chose to project Monk’s imaginary characters onto the screen. Was it strictly for comic effect? (The over-the-top melodrama is funny.) Or was it to demonstrate that the very stereotypes that Monk despises live in him, a sentiment which is echoed when he becomes angry seeing Stagg R. Lee’s novel become a sensation. He is dismayed and angry when he discovers Coraline has a copy. It would seem Monk recognizes Lee in himself, exacerbating his own self-hate, a condition his brother Cliff also shares.
As Monk Ellison, Jeffrey Wright gives what is probably the finest performance of a stellar career. Layer upon layer of Monk’s protective shield are slowly peeled away, revealing a frightened middle-aged man forced to face his family, his art, and himself as a member of society. He finds he can no longer transcend his race. Wright captures Monk’s bewilderment and despair perfectly. The rest of the cast, particularly Sterling K. Brown and Cliff, is stellar.
American Fiction is a funny, disturbing, and complex film that addresses issues of race, art, and modern culture. The screenplay creates a world in which these larger issues are so carefully interwoven into the lives of Ellison family whose members are still struggling with personal identity and guilt that the two cannot be undone.
The ending, however, is the cherry on the cake, a revelation that nothing exists outside our personal and social narratives. Everything is a fiction.