American Fiction: Jeffrey Wright Shines In Publishing World Satire
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
Jeffrey Wright is an actor who is always rewarding to watch, consistently giving the impression of thinking on his feet, typically making subtle but precise choices to grasp his character’s centre of gravity.
He gets a splendid showcase in American Fiction, a serious comedy about race, academia, publishing and family, which won the People’s Choice Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Based on Percival Evans’ 2001 novel Erasure, the film is a debut feature from Cord Jefferson, a TV writer (Master of None, The Good Place, Watchmen). If the movie around him occasionally wobbles, Wright’s performance stays true.
Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist and African American literature professor, who we first meet teaching a class in Southern American fiction. The title of the work under discussion is one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, featuring the N-word in is title written on a blackboard behind him. A young white woman student objects and Monk snaps at her: “With all due respect, Britney, I got over it. I’m pretty sure you will, too.”
Responding to the student’s complaint, as well as Monk’s history of politically incorrect infractions, his department head suggests Monk take a temporary leave of absence, following his trip to a literary conference in his hometown of Boston.
At the conference, Monk’s panel is barely attended because everyone is interested in the new sensation, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose book, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto pushes all Monk’s buttons. It’s a narrative of urban wretchedness, written in African American vernacular English, by an Oberlin-educated author whose speech sounds nothing like the way she writes.
Monk dismisses her work as “Black trauma porn.” Meanwhile, his own novel, based on Aeschylus’ The Persians, is languishing without a publisher because his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tells him his work just isn’t Black enough to sell in the current market.
As well as being estranged from the current publishing world, Monk is at odds with his affluent family. They include his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a recently divorced OB-GYN doctor, and his plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown).
Cliff’s wife found him in bed with another man and he has some serious alimony costs as well as his new hard-partying lifestyle to pay for. Their regal mother Agnes (1960 TV star Leslie Uggams) is in the early stages of dementia and the siblings insist Monk has to chip in for the expensive care home. And what to do with the longtime family maid, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) once mother is in the home? Rich people’s problems, but real nonetheless.
The action settles in the coastal town of Scituate, Massachusetts where the family kept a summer home, and where we learn in passing, in a barely explored subplot, their famous doctor father took his life. Another sudden tragedy leaves Monk with the sole responsibility of finding, and paying for, a place for his mother. Not everything is falling apart though. Monk meets an attractive neighbour, Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer who has read his fiction, and seems eager to crack through his prickly defenses and get to know him better.
One night, while draining a whiskey bottle, he dashes off a satiric parody of a popular Black trauma novel, full of violence, drugs, absentee dads, and guns. As he writes, he envisions the protagonists, played by Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan, as a father and son in a bitter reconciliation.
He sends the novel off to his publisher in jest. Then the agent submits it to a publisher, who promptly offers him a six-figure deal. To keep the ruse going, Monk is compelled to add some growl to his voice and slouch to his walk to adopt the persona of the supposed author, an ex-con and fugitive known as Stagg R. Leigh.
In a sense, he becomes the embodiment of what W.E. Dubois called “double consciousness” of Black people in a racist society, caught between his lived reality and the demeaning stereotype.
To add to complications, Monk finds himself on a literary prize committee along with Sintara Golden, judging his own book, written under a pseudonym. Despite both his and Sintara’s objections to the book, the white committee members champion the novel, insisting that Black voices must be heard.
As the ruse progresses, a Quentin Tarantino-like director (Adam Brody) expresses interest in the projection. He’s currently working on an exploitation picture called Plantation Annihilation, in which the ghosts of slaves go on a killing spree.
Pointed, wryly funny, and well-cast, American Fiction is easy to recommend for its humour and timely commentary. The issue of selling Black art that panders to white prejudices dates back at least to James Baldwin’s 1949 critique of Richard Wright’s bestseller, Native Son. The subject has fresh relevance in the current post-Black Lives Matter era, when organizations are anxious to demonstrate diversity on committees and panels, and the entertainment industry is producing a record number of Black-themed films and television series.
As a satire of cosmetic inclusiveness, moral posturing, and the popularity of trauma narratives, one senses that American Fiction could have been a bit harder.
A late encounter between Monk and Sintara is naggingly ambiguous. She chides him for his grouchy snobbery and privilege but doesn’t establish that her writing isn’t stigmatizing. Also, it’s simply the case that Jefferson spreads the story too thin, as the script meanders into another dysfunctional family movie with its own share of trauma and sentimentality.
Ultimately though, the flaws are minor because American Fiction breathes life because of Wright’s performance, Monk’s forceful presence, his discomfort and vulnerability, wit and bumptious, righteous annoyance.
American Fiction. Directed and written by Cord Jefferson, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, and Sterling K Brown. In theatres December 22.