Everyone wants to feel seen as who they are, not who others think they should be. In the smart, hilarious comedy/drama AMERICAN FICTION, college professor/author Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), called “Monk” by family and friends, is frustrated when a publisher turns down his latest novel for not being a “Black novel.” “I’m Black, and I wrote it, it’s a Black novel,” the author complains to his agent Arthur (John Ortiz). “Your books are good,” the agent tells him, “they’re just not popular.” It seems his books just don’t fit audiences’ preconceived notions of what a Black novel should be – gritty, urban, struggling, violent perhaps. At a literary conference, Ellison hears author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), a Black academic like himself, read from her own latest hit novel, a novel that fits those expectations. The frustrated Ellison decides, sarcastically, to write a novel that hits all those expected stereotypic beats – as a joke. Except the joke finds a publisher.
Smart, clever AMERICAN FICTION is simply laugh-out-loud funny, perhaps the year’s funniest film, and also has an unpredictable story that you never know where it will go next. Director/writer Cord Jefferson based his excellent film on Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” but much of the success of the film goes to the film’s cast, which also includes Sterling K Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz and Leslie Uggams, and to Jefferson’s script. Besides being a biting, clever satire – of publishing, of the reading public, of contemporary American culture overall, and the meaning of “authentic” – that builds to breathlessly funny absurdity as this joke spins out of control, the film is also an insightful, even warm family drama, as the lead character, no flawless hero himself, is forced to deal with his not-too-functional family and his own shortcomings.
A curmudgeonly grumbler, Monk has been, informally, put on leave for the semester from his teaching job, for offending the sensibilities of a student. His dean suggests that he go to the literary conference he has planned to attend (where he hears that other author), and then stay on to visit with his Massachusetts-based family to “relax.” “You think spending time with my family is relaxing?” Monk snorts. Turns out, college professor/author Monk is a bit of a “black sheep” in his affluent Black family, where both his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) are doctors, and his widowed mother Agnes (a wonderful Leslie Uggams) is vaguely disappointed in her youngest child.
Monk’s sister Lisa (a wonderful Tracee Ellis Ross) teases her sourpuss brother Monk relentlessly but there is an affection between them underneath it. Since Monk lives on the other side of the country, he has not seen the decline in their mother that Lisa is dealing with. She tells Monk that things are not going well with their mother, who seems to be in the early stages of dementia, and asks her brother for help getting her into assisted living.
It is a topic nearly all families deal with at some point as parents age, and having one sibling avoiding the topic while another is shouldering the larger burden is a familiar theme too. Early cognitive decline means his mother’s filter is sometimes off, and Leslie Uggams’ Agnes Ellison veers between fondly fussing over her younger son, and painful criticism and even some embarrassing non-PC remarks, in a fine performance.
Monk gets along much better with his sister than his brother Cliff, and Sterling K Brown gives a striking performance as Cliff, an out-spoken cosmetic surgeon, recently out of the closet and going through a messy divorce. There are verbal sparks between the brothers and personalities clash big time.
AMERICAN FICTION unfurls along two narrative tracks in brilliant parallel, one a farcical path about what happens with that “joke” novel and the other a sharp family comedy/drama. The very talented Jeffrey Wright giving a outstanding performance that is by turns bitingly funny and the other touchingly human, creating a character with real depth. The other narrative track has humor too but also a dash of realism, as Monk grapples with his family issues and his own flaws.
The bulk of the laugh-out-loud humor comes from the thread about the “joke” novel. At the literary conference, Issa Rae hits the right notes as the scholarly, erudite academic Sintara Golden, who jars us when she reads in street slang from her inner-city set novel, and then is praised for the novel’s “authenticity,” despite the mismatch between who she is and the characters in the novel (a subject that comes up in a later scene between the two writers). Irritated by the response to her novel, Monk writes his sarcastic “joke” book, a memoir titled “My Pafology” under a pseudonym that should have been a tip-off: Stagg R. Leigh. Shocked when a publisher expresses interest, Monk tries to wave it off but his agent presses him to go ahead and sell it – because he needs the money. That requires that the buttoned-down Monk pose as fugitive ex-con author Stagg R. Leigh in dealing with the publishers, who are far too thrilled to be dealing with the “dangerous” but cool Stagg R. Leigh, in some hilarious scenes.
Monk finds himself living two lives, and trying to keep them separate, a situation rich in humor potential that both Cord Jefferson and Jeffrey Wright use hilariously. The film also has a love interest, with a neighbor, Coraline (Erika Alexander), at the family’s beach house, which adds another layer of complexity to Monk’s already complicated life.
Few movies are as smart and funny as AMERICAN FICTION, and few actors who could carry the lead role in it as perfectly as Jeffrey Wright. This is a must-see film, and a film on my and many critics’ Top Ten lists for 2023’s best films, and it is a sure thing to continue to garner nominations and win awards as the movie awards season makes its way to the Oscars.
AMERICAN FICTION opens Friday, Jan. 5, in theaters.
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
