Can you be black in America and not live in the hood? What would the Great American Novel look like if it turned on the life and thoughts of a black man, rather than some old white dude like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow?
American Fiction tackles those questions and a few more, in the process handing a great role to Jeffrey Wright, already one of the greats, but bolstered here by a fantastic cast who lift him to greater heights.
Wright plays American college professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose career is put on hold after his latest burst of “inappropriate” behaviour with one of his snowflake students. This throws him back on the other leg of his career, as a novelist. But he’s in trouble here too, struggling to get published because, according to his agent (John Ortiz), his books are not black enough. More ghetto, more rap and crack, more early death at the hands of the police is what the public wants, he’s told.
Seeing a fellow writer, Sintara Golden, being lionised on account of her latest book, We’s Lives in Da Hood, a misery-porn collection of black stereotypes, Monk goes home and writes a furious riposte, a pastiche of the black ghetto novel full of “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack… what’s blacker than that?”, changing the original title from My Pathology to My Pafology, then later changing it again to Fuck, out of sheer badness.
It is a massive hit, and Monk is suddenly a hot property. More precisely the writer of Fuck is a hit and Monk has to quickly assemble an alter ego, ghetto writer Stagg R Leigh, an under-educated, largely inarticulate fugitive from the law, or so his story goes.
Two different lives here: the middle class Monk, a black man with two black men’s names (Thelonious from jazzer Thelonious Monk, Ellison from Ralph Ellison, writer of Invisible Man), yet who lives the “white” middle-class life of education, a family beach house, a loving family, with a brother (Sterling K Brown) who is openly gay. Then there’s Leigh, the ill-educated felon on the run.
Being rewarded for reinforcing the black stereotype and then being trapped inside the deceit is a plot turn that could have been lifted from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, one of his best films, certainly one of his feistiest. Debut director Cord Jefferson is working from the novel Erasure by Percial Everett, published a year after Bamboozled debuted in 2000.
Jefferson leaves the bones of Everett’s story intact and doesn’t mess with the characters either. But he goes to town visually, taking pains to set his movie completely in the world of the Great American Novel – of campuses and publisher’s offices, with complex, talky relationships and moments of comedy punctuating sexual escapades and humiliations big and small.
Great cast, some well known, some not. Fabulous ensemble playing, but standouts include Brown as Monk’s errant brother, an old-school hedonist with some of the film’s funniest scenes. Ortiz as Monk’s concerned agent hypnotised by the smell of money, also funny. Leslie Uggams as Monk’s mother, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s but still a force in his life. Erika Alexander as Coraline, a smart romantic interest who’s no pushover. And Issa Rae as Golden, the canny writer turning out successful books pandering to a skanky stereotype who, in the film’s central set-piece, defends herself to Monk, arguing that she cannot fix the way white people perceive black people, so why not make a living from it? It sounds a bit less “yeh… and?” the way she phrases it.
Jefferson’s direction veers occasionally towards the Hallmark – which might be deliberate – and the cute (which possibly isn’t) but it doesn’t matter too much. The latent energy in the plot sustains the whole movie, the performances add more bounce and there are also laughs – springing from character interaction not set-up/pay-off gag-writing.
Monk is the uptight but likeable everyman walking into traps of his own making and Wright wanders through his portrayal of this flawed hero in that perplexed, distracted manner he has long since perfected. He has been doing this since he became famous playing Jean-Michel Basquiat in Basquiat, his breakout in 1996. In a long, non-stop career, this brilliant actor has so rarely had a lead role since. Which is what, at bottom, American Fiction is also all about.
American Fiction – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
