Film Notes

American Fiction review – entertaining comedy collision of race, class and envy.

This enjoyable meta-level adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure tackles black-victimhood stereotypes, showcasing Jeffrey Wright and Issa Rae as rival writers.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a middle-aged black humanities professor in Los Angeles, roundly disliked by students and faculty colleagues, who is the author of many intellectually demanding and commercially disastrous novels based on classical myth. Depressed by his career and by money worries – including an elderly mother needing residential care for dementia – Monk is finally triggered by the bestselling triumph of a new novel by black author Sintara Golden, entitled We’s Lives in da Ghetto, which apparently panders to all the illiterate black-victimhood cliches beloved of white cultural gatekeepers. Enraged, Monk writes a spoof hood-violence novel, My Pafology, by the supposed convicted felon Stagg R Leigh, and sends it to his agent, assuming the obvious crassness will signal its satirical intent. But then … well, those acquainted with the Broadway career of Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom might guess what happens next.

American Fiction is the highly entertaining new literary comedy from film-maker Cord Jefferson, a TV writer making his feature directing debut with his own emollient adaptation of the metafictional masterpiece Erasure by Percival Everett, published in 2001. Jeffrey Wright is an excellent Monk: sensitive, morose, prickly and idealistic in a gloomily self-harming way. Tracee Ross Ellis is his shrewd physician sister Lisa; Sterling K Brown is his cosmetic surgeon brother Cliff, who has just come out as gay; Leslie Uggams is affectingly dignified as Monk’s mother Agnes; Issa Rae is Monk’s nemesis, Sintara Golden. It all works very enjoyably, despite Jefferson sugaring the original a little, including changing the specific kind of medical practice that Lisa has.

American Fiction succeeds in spite of arguably flunking a particular challenge, faced up to more candidly by Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell-Boyce with their adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in A Cock and Bull Story from 2006, or Harold Pinter with his screenplay version of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981, adaptations which explicitly attempted to reproduce in realist movie terms the originals’ meta-levels of narrative. This is because the midsection of Everett’s original novel includes the text of My Pafology in its entirety; it is long enough for readers to immerse themselves in it, to register how absurd and exaggerated it is but also see its thrilling gusto and energy and maybe even, who knows, wonder if the author perhaps toyed with the idea of attempting a bestseller like this himself but settled for presenting it in quotation marks.

So in transposing this to film, Jefferson must surely have pondered the possibility of making his Monk a highbrow film studies professor whose My Pafology is not a novel but a screenplay for something like New Jack City (which is referenced here). Well, Jefferson engages with these ideas at the end, and it is an amusing and absorbing fantasy of how class and race and literary taste collide, and a parable of career defeat ironically redeemed by society’s hypocrisy and absurdity. It is also a mordant study of literary envy: Monk’s angry imitation of We’s Lives in da Ghetto reminded me a little of Kingsley Amis’s description in his memoirs of being rattled by the superior success of a despised rival, and his fleeting fear that he should simply swallow his pride and imitate this person’s style.

At one point Jefferson invents a confrontation between Monk and Sintara in which Sintara stands up for her novel, and this is perhaps a loss of satirical nerve (the author’s name is incidentally more obviously parodic in the book). Wright and Rae play the scene with conviction, however, and make us see a kind of snobbery in Monk’s reaction to her success, and maybe something gendered too. Then there is something a bit farcical when Monk has to pose in public as the slouching imaginary badass Stagg R Leigh – but perhaps no more farcical than the real-life case of the author Laura Albert, exposed in 2006 for inventing phoney abuse survivor JT LeRoy, who had written thrillingly authentic fictions about her supposedly troubled life, and got her sister-in-law to put on a wig and sunglasses to be this reclusive literary genius. (Erasure in fact predates this case.)

Broad-brush American Fiction might be, but its approach to race and racism is oblique and unexpected, and it’s very funny about publishing’s literary ghetto.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 31 Jan 2024.

We’re Going to Be Talking About American Fiction All Awards Season Long.

This review was originally published on September 10, 2023. T At the 2024 Oscars, American Fiction won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

When at rest, Jeffrey Wright’s face tends toward the serious. He has a heavy brow, which he likes to accentuate by tilting his head forward and looking over the glasses he frequently wears onscreen. That air of weary authority that Wright so effortlessly projects has, in recent years, been put in service to roles as cops and generals, politicians and journalists, and, in American Fiction, an academic. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author and professor who at first seems like another of these figures of seen-it-all prominence. But, despite his depression and bursts of anger, there’s a lightness to Monk that soon sets him apart. At a book festival, he walks into a talk being given by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose debut novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, is being fawned over by the moderator. When Sintara — an Oberlin-educated former publishing assistant who gets cheers from the crowd by wondering “Where is our representation?” — abruptly switches to AAVE when reading from her book, Monk’s eyebrows levitate up his head. They rise so far that they seem on the verge of forming parentheses that could excerpt him from the whole experience until, with perfect timing, his face is replaced by the rapturous one of a white woman in the audience who’s just shot to her feet in front of him to participate in a standing ovation.

American Fiction is an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a dark comedy about how Monk is unable to find a publisher for his own latest manuscript, a reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians, because it’s deemed inadequately Black. In a burst of frustration, and having just watched a bit of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ on a hotel TV, he scribbles out a compendium of over-the-top clichés about urban suffering under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, titles it “My Pafology,” and gets his reluctant agent (John Ortiz) to send it to publishers in what he thinks will be received as a scathing critique of their narrow conception of the Black experience. Instead, he gets a huge offer, leaving Monk in conflicted anguish because with his mother (Leslie Uggams) showing signs of memory slippage, he does really need the money. Everett’s book exists in the shadow of Sapphire’s Push, though it’s not as though the racial commodification he mocked has gone anywhere — hell, whether it’s an intentional reference point or not, American Dirt was published just three years ago. Still, the film, which marks the directorial debut of journalist turned TV writer Cord Jefferson, also explores the ripe territory that is the Hollywood-adaptation pipeline.

I’ve already had arguments about whether the satire in American Fiction is too broad, the sort that lets its audience knowingly laugh along rather than feel indicted. Having served on an awards committee whose deliberations ended in a situation close to the one put onscreen in the film, I’d say it’s dead on. But Jefferson also, wisely, approaches the material as foremost the story of a closed-off man for whom professional bitterness has become another means of shutting everyone out. Monk is not there just to be on the receiving end of the well-intentioned bigotry of a reductive industry or to serve as the avatar for anyone driven to the edge by that industry’s insistence on treating any material about race as something to be consumed in an act of educational penance. He’s also someone whose habitual aloofness extends to his relationship with his mother, who lives alone in his childhood home in Boston, as well as his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor at a women’s-health clinic, and his brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), a plastic surgeon whose delayed coming out has led him to some heavy partying.

An early scene of bantering between a reunited Monk and Lisa is so wry and comfortable, with Wright and Ross terrific at showing flashes of the kids these two characters once were, that I almost wished the film were focused just on the Ellison family, whose siblings are grappling with having to inherit the roles of adults. The secret of American Fiction is that it’s stealthily the thing Monk longs for — a portrait of Black characters who are not representatives of inner-city oppression, who have upper-middle-class lives and who grew up with a beach house on Martha’s Vineyard, and who have their own richly delineated set of problems. The literary-world jabs are sharp and funny, but it’s the rueful family dynamics that make the film rewarding, as well as the performances. Like its fellow fall release Dream Scenario, it owes a debt to Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. And eventually, it backs itself into a corner, ending with a “what can you do” shrug. But Wright’s turn in particular, as the sad sack who has both a point and his own respectability hangups, lingers in the mind. Monk is a guy who’s so sure he has seen it all that he can’t acknowledge his own blind spots.

Alison Willmore, New York Magazine, Updated Mar. 10, 2024

What you thought about American Fiction

Film Responses

Collated Response Comments

92 members and guests attended the first screening of the new season. The total number of responses received was 44 delivering a film score of 4.55 and a 48% response rate. Many thanks.

All of your comments are collected below.

“I really enjoyed this film from the whole premise to the plot, acting and witty dialogue including the film within a film element and the various endings”.

“This was wonderful. I love the satirical sendup of Woke-ism and Black victim-hood. Lots of very funny passages as well as some very relevant comment about current society despite being set in a previous age. Bring it on GFS”.

“Enjoyed the exploration of different endings, and found the film both thought provoking and amusing at times”.

“What a great start to the 2024/25 season! Funny, ironic and well-acted film with nicely positioned social commentary. Hints of farce and slightly cheesy romantic story lines but carried through by the wholesome nature of the film and cast relationships. Superb performance by Jeffrey Wright in the lead role”.

“A cracking start to the season! Humorous and unpredictable with some very strong performances, particularly from Jeffrey Wright as Monk. Covered a lot of big issues - race, homosexuality, dementia with sensitivity and humour but without sentimentality. An excellent ending too, I certainly didn't see that coming. Another great choice, thanks”.

“A fantastic start to this season of films at GFS. American Fiction had everything, love, death, humour, drugs, homosexuality, a bit of violence at the same time as presenting a really important viewpoint about racism”.

“Family melodrama mixed in with a story of writer involving stereotypical characters of all colours. It was hard to warm to the cynical character 'Monk' and there is a subplot involving his romance with the neighbour who lives across the street which lacks any depth and fizzles out without significant impact on the narrative. The film's conclusion, suggesting Monk's story as a fictional creation, feels like a cop-out and 'wants to have its cake and eat it.' Sadly, a missed opportunity on interesting complex themes. 'The Producers' was far more fun!”

“Parable-like. A conversation on the complexity of identity that I hope opens the eyes of those not familiar with being stereotyped. Full of irony and comedic moments. If you liked this I'd recommend 'Sorry To Bother You' by Boots Riley”.

“The film was an important reminder of the dangers of limiting the complexity of human experience to singular narratives built on harmful stereotypes. The writing was clever, funny at times and raw at others. There were several threads which mostly bound together, chaotic at times, but perhaps this was the aim”.

“Clever, involving, extremely funny bur also thought provoking. Perfect ending”.

“Very enjoyable – loved it”.

“Powerful”.

“Great fun but also attitudes portrait of a family”.

“Very good, excellent story line and script”.

“I think this also reflects British attitudes to ‘minorities. Brilliant movie”.

“Thought provoking, surprising, creative”.

“A very clever and witty film”.

“Brilliant”.

“Very good and clever story”.

“Too violent for me, but topics raised were relevant”.

“Very well cast – loved the humour and irony and totally agree with Monks point of view – great entertainment”.

“Great acting. Fascinating story – poor ending”.