At one point in AMERICANN FICTION, the provocatively named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), notes that there is no moral to his story. Perhaps, though, that >is< the moral. In his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, Cord Jefferson takes on many issues for which there are no clear-cut answers, but for which the questions around them are timely and not a little jarring deconstructed with such gleeful abandon.
Monk is going through a bad patch as we meet him. It’s been several years since he’s published one of is scholarly books about the relevance of ancient literature to the modern experience, the latest failing even to find a publisher for failing to be “black” enough to express the African-American experience. He’s just made a white student cry when she objects to his printing the N -word (part of the classes syllabus) on the college classroom’s white board. Plus, It’s not the first time he’s failed to handle delicate questions of race and politics in his classroom. As a result, he’s “invited” by his Los Angeles university to take an extended break after attending a Boston book fair and visit his family back there to unwind and recoup. Though it’s not a typical nightmare of dysfunction, this upper-middle class family of doctors and university professors is not an easy environment. There are long-standing slights and regrets infusing the conversations with his sister (Tracey Ross Ellis), and his brother (Sterling K. Brown), who are both recovering from scathing divorces, and his mother (Leslie Uggams), who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. After a particularly dispiriting day wherein everything wrong in his life seems to converge in a nexus of chaos, he takes a few drinks and in the course of one evening turns out what he thinks is a spoof of what the publishing world expects from him. The, as he puts it, flattened African-American experience that is limited to the downtrodden and desperately poor of the ghetto, and that ignores his own African-America experience as not worthy. Or even real. The result is a novel of violence, drugs, and brutality, the sort of life with which Monk is as unfamiliar as the gatekeepers in the publishing houses that have rejected him. Submitted under an assumed name, it becomes a media phenomenon to the delight of his Puerto Rican agent (John Ortiz), and to his own great astonishment, and even greater chagrin. Monk suddenly finds himself the latest spokesperson for a reality of which he knows little, and cluelessly attempting to impersonate the gangsta he credits with writing the novel.
Wright is a genius. The introspection and uneasiness, the subsumed anger sublimated into caustic wit that turns inward. His conversations with the characters he’s writing while working out a vernacular as a second, and imperfect, language that externalizes his own inner prejudices; that tiny sweet moment when he accepts a kiss on the forehead from the wounded brother that has let him down. It is a nuanced performance of great depth and perfect comedic sensibilities. He is the perfect delivery vehicle for the points the filmmaker is so deftly making.
In a turn of bittersweet satire played at levels both refined and absurd, Jefferson sets his sights on the many kinds of fiction which make up the fabric of our culture and our personal lives, from the brother who burst from the closet, to the only sort of African-American story that is considered marketable. He also considers the balancing act between art and commerce. As the money rolls in, alleviating Monk’s precarious situation, his ethics force him to again and again try to sabotage the monster he’s created, only to discover that the increasingly unhinged demands of his alter ego, a fugitive ex-con writing his truth, only make the book more enticing to the media. The conversations he has with his agent are a dialectic on the perils of not pandering to the expectations of the masses, while a pointed exchange with another massively successful author (Issa Raye) who has produced a similar novel outside her own experience, but under her own name, takes on the role of the author in a world where book sales are declining and the industry as a whole is staring at the abyss.
Valid potshots are taken at the “woke” white people hoping to cash in on the book, but with a curious compassion for them wanting to be on the right side of history. Definition of family are broadened, and the power of forgiveness becomes both a bone of contention and a source of healing even if resolution, another word for that mythic concept of closure, isn’t available. In Jefferson’s hands, it doesn’t need to be. His is a thoughtful, humane script that is studded with watchwords. There’s a reason the family’s maid (Myra Lucretia Taylor) is named Lorraine, and that the neighbor (Erika Alexander) who draws Monk out of his self-imposed aloneness is named Coraline. And there are signs, such as book of the not Puerto Rican Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry takes pride of place on the agent’s desk. He has crafted sharp, funny film about the apotheosis of cultures, a quintessence if you will, that accepts the past for what is was, and is, with varying degrees of unease.
AMERICAN FICTION is a profound film that has a light touch and subversive stance. It is a perfect koan that makes the pondering a treat as well as an exercise in heartbreak, frustration, and self-revelation.
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