Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.
There are times with a directorial debut comes as a surprise. I was shocked that Get Out was Jordan Peele’s first movie, and still have trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that the Coen Brothers’ first movie was Blood Simple. There are other times when you can see the clear talent in the director but it’s equally evident that they are coming in unseasoned and undisciplined. Boots Riley lost track of the narrative in the third act of Sorry to Bother You, for instance. This is exactly the feeling I got with Cord Jefferson and American Fiction. Jefferson has talent, but right now doesn’t seem to have full control over the storytelling aspect of the film. I haven’t read the book on which the film is based, so I don’t know how much of this comes from the actual story being told and how much of this is the lack of experience of Jefferson. American Fiction wants to do something very different with the story that it is telling, but the ending dives hard into levels and levels of meta that it can’t quite sustain as well as it wants to. Because of this, the last 15 minutes or so feel flat and a bit of a letdown after the bulk of the movie.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a critically acclaimed but mainly unread author making his living not as a writer but as a professor. He hasn’t published in some time, and his latest book is being rejected by publishers in large part for “not being Black enough.” He’s put on temporary leave by his university because of his controversial and confrontational teaching style, so he spends some time at a literary conference in Boston. He’s not fond of Boston because that’s where much of his family lives, and Monk is the sort of person for whom family is more burden than anything else. He’s cordial with them, but not much more.
Three things happen in Boston that cause Monk to reevaluate his life. The first is the fact that his mother (Leslie Uggams) is clearly starting to suffer from Alzheimer’s. The second is the sudden and shocking death of his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross). Third, and for Monk the most important in many ways is the discovery of author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae).
Golden’s book is the sort of trauma porn that a lot of people seem to love. From all appearances, it is written in the style of something like Precious, with misspellings and colloquial language, and tells a tale of abandoned single mothers living in the ghetto. For all that, though, Golden appears to be someone like Monk, much more at home in a world of exclusive colleges and a more middle class background. And yet she is selling thousands of books while Monk finds his own books placed in what he considers the wrong category at a bookstore.
In a fit of spiteful inspiration, Monk pens a novel about crime, rapping, ghetto life, and absent fathers he calls “My Pafology,” which he sends to his publisher as a sort of angry joke, demanding it be sent out. Both are thus shocked when an offer comes back for a $750,000 advance and $4 million for the movie rights. This solves Monk’s money problems for his mother’s care, but it also forces him to adopt the persona of the book’s author, the pen name Stagg R. Leigh, who he claims is a wanted fugitive.
Through all of this, Monk deals with his mother’s care, his nascent relationship with Coraline (Erika Alexander), and his problems with his brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), who is dealing with the fallout from his failed marriage caused by his realization that he is gay. He’s also forced to keep the secret of who wrote the book, which he demands that the publisher print under the new name “Fuck.” Meanwhile, Monk is tapped to act as a judge for a prestigious book award, and is shocked when Fuck is entered into the competition by his publisher.
There’s a lot going on in American Fiction, which is both a strength and a problem with the film. It’s a strength because it feels like real life. Things happen around Monk that aren’t specifically related to the plot just as they would in real life. Monk deals with problems that ultimately don’t have much of a comment on his life or the story that we’re being told the same way that suddenly needing to repair a broken window or discovering that one of your shoes has blown out and you need a new pair doesn’t necessarily comment on your life.
It's a problem, though, because this is a film and we expect things to have meaning. A lot of the subplots for American Fiction are simply left hanging, like Monk’s relationship with Cliff, the continuing care for his mother, and his relationship with Coraline. While real in the sense that we don’t always get closure in real life, these things are frustrating because we expect closure in movies. We expect that if we see Chekov’s gun in the first act, it’s going to be meaningful in the third act, and we don’t really get that with American Fiction.
There’s a lot to like here, though. The cast is fantastic top to bottom. Both Wright and Brown were Oscar nominated for their roles and both of them are fantastic on screen. I also love Leslie Uggams, and she’s great here as well. It’s Tracee Ellis Ross who is the brightest spot, though—I would have loved another 15 minutes of her in the film. She’s funny and quick and vibrant, and even in death gets the best lines.
The truth, though, is that American Fiction spins out of control at the end and there’s no way around it. It’s a fantastic idea, but everybody got painted into a corner and it shows.
Why to watch American Fiction: This is a reminder of what satire should really look like.
Why not to watch: It loses where it wants to go in the third act.
