American Fiction

American Fiction (2023, directed by Cord Jefferson) is a witty, warm and generous, and, above all, civilized.  It's a cautious, intelligent movie about race and family. The movie is pretty good and quite entertaining. If it seems that I am damning the picturewith faint praise, this is intentional.  

There are three (possibly four) separate movies fused together in American Fiction.  More than half of the film is a family drama with romantic comedy elements -- this aspect of the movie is conventional and sentimental.  The domestic melodrama, involving several tragedies, grounds the the picture:  the African-American protagonists are almost exactly like the target demographic for the movie:  well-heeled, with complicated sex lives, and the sort of prosperity that includes a servant and a beach house.  (The characters are like the elites that we used to see in Woody Allen movies -- money is not a problem for them and so they can brood instead on romantic entanglements.)  Alongside the family drama and the rom-com, there is a parallel plot that involves race-relations and the media.  This aspect of the picture is satirical and angry, although it's sharp edges are blurred a bit by the other warmer elements in the movie.  Finally, there is a fourth strand to the picture that seems post-modern, a Pirandello-style aspect to American Fiction involving an embedded narrative and indeterminate ending presented in three alternative versions -- the audience gets to decide how they want the movie to end.  This latter strand in the film emerges in its fullest development in the movie's last ten minutes, a jarring intrusion into the picture that is surprising and feels like a "cop-out"; the screenwriter and director didn't know how to end the picture and, so, several (not too compelling) options are presented.  This part of the picture also surfaces briefly in a Pirandellesque sequence midway through the picture in which the hero, a writer, is composing a salacious narrative that we see acted-out as he types --from time to time, the caricatured bad-asses in his novel turn to the writer and ask him what they are supposed to do next.  This is amusing but cuts against the grain of the film.  (There are some great movies that combine completely disparate elements:  Hitchcock's Psycho is the most notorious example of this kind of picture, swerving alarmingly from its sex and heist plot when the heroine reaches the Bates Motel; Brian de Palma's astonishing Body Double also explores the idea of a mid-picture change of course deviating from slasher-horror to something like musical comedy.  I'm not opposed to films containing jarring changes of pace and theme; but here I observe that American Fiction is too conventional to pull this off in a convincing manner.)

American Fiction starts strong.  The hero, Thelonius Ellison (called "Monk" after the jazz musician) is a novelist who has written literary fiction well-reviewed enough to earn him a gig at a liberal arts college.  He's teaching a short story to students by Flannery O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger", much to the consternation of one of his students.  There's a clash about use of the so-called N-word and Monk loses his temper.  We learn that Monk hasn't been able to publish his most recent novel and may be creatively blocked; the administration reluctantly suspends him and he attends a book fair where he sees another African-American writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) feted for her raw portrait of life in the ghetto -- she's a darling of the White upper middle-class folks attending the festival; her novel is written in some hideously caricatured species of Ebonics and Monk finds the whole thing offensive and, even, racist.  (Monk doesn't regard himself as a Black writer but simply as an author and he says that he doesn't even think about race -- a view of the world undercut in a short, cutting scene in which we see him try to hail a taxi that ignores him to pick up a White customer.)  Monk goes home to Boston where his family is in chaos -- his mother (played by Leslie Uggams) is suffering from dementia and there are some scary scenes involving her wandering away from the house or appearing to be utterly dazed and confused.  Monk's hyper-competent sister, an ob-gyn, is managing the situation but needs help.  But, then, in a dire sequence, she has a heart attack in a restaurant and dies.  We learn some Gothic details about the family:  Monk's father who was also a gynecologist committed suicide -- he was a philanderer and everyone in the family was aware of his affairs (except the rather absent-minded professor, Monk); Monk's brother, Cliff, who is flamboyantly gay, has come back from Tucson for his sister's funeral -- he's also a doctor, a plastic surgeon.  The deceased sister has been recently divorced and Cliff has just ended a long-term relationship; money is tight:  the family pays a maid, Lorraine, and own a beach-house as well as their Boston residence; in other words, they have an expensive life-style.  Much of the action takes place at the Beach House where the family gathers for their sister's obsequies.  There's a meet-cute with an attractive neighbor and Monk and the woman have an affair.  

Nursing Home care is costly and Monk, as a joke and to earn money, writes a parody novel, incorporating every possible stereotype about the Black underclass:  criminality, deadbeat dads, and pervasive gun violence, all of this expressed in raunchy ghetto-ese.  Monk's literary agent sends the manuscript to a publisher under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a reference to the prototypical Black bad hombre, Staggerlee.  The parody is called My Pafology ('f' for 'th').  Monk's recent serious novel, said to be a modern variant on Aeschylus The Persians, has been "passed on" by his publisher -- but My Pafology is greeted with wild enthusiasm.  Monk is paid a $750,000 advance on the novel and, later, agrees to a four million dollar contract for movie rights.  Monk does some interviews, making a code-switch to appear as a tough guy fugitive from justice.  (Later, in a provocative gesture ecstatically received by his white editors, he demands that the novel be re-named "Fuck".)  When the book appears in print, it is a number-one bestseller, demonstrating that the stupidity and guilt of White readers knows no bounds.  Later, in a development that the viewers can see coming a mile away, Monk is appointed to a committee charged with making a prestigious literary award.  Of course, Fuck as it is now called, appears on the list of best books of the year and Monk is faced with deliberations involving the novel that he has pseudonymously  written.  Both he and Sintara Golden, also on the panel, dislike Fuck immensely and see it as salacious and pandering.  But the White members of the jury all rave about the book's authenticity and rage.  Meanwhile, Monk's mother's memory is deteriorating.  (In one moving scene, she says that she always knew that her son was a genius; but, then, we realize she doesn't know to whom she is speaking -- although Monk takes her words to be about him, in fact, she's talking about her homosexual son, Cliff.)  The stress of maintaining the lie about Fuck preys on Monk and he gets in a nasty fight with his girlfriend to the extent that they break-up.  The family's maid, Lorraine, falls in love with a gentleman caller and, in a sweet subplot, they get married.  Everything, then, leads to the awards banquet where the prize will be given to the alleged fugitive from justice, Stagg R. Leigh.  A callow young director, a sort of Quentin Tarantino wannabe, is directing a movie about Stagg R. Leigh's improbable career as an author and this triggers the film's post-modern and recursive gesture to the audience -- we get to decide on the film's ending.  

Jeffrey Wright is superb as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison and the entire cast is excellent.  The movie has some sharply written satire but is mostly a sentimental family drama trafficking in revelations and reconciliations, pretty standard stuff.  The theme of the Black artist nudged into exploiting racist tropes for profit is explored brilliantly in Spike Lee's much more problematic and indignant Bamboozled -- in that film, an African-American artist performs in minstrel corked-up black-face, intending offensive satire but, astonished, to find that White people love the character and are willing to pay him a fortune for his offensively caricatured performance.  Spike Lee's picture is a sort of encyclopedia of racist mass-media imagery, contains some raw sexual material, and, further, demonstrates a very peculiar and poignant response to the minstrel humor that it exploits -- Lee seems weirdly nostalgic for the good old days in which racist themes were overt and, somehow, endearingly goofy.  Bamboozled is everything that American Fiction is not:  it's legitimately disturbing, outrageous, and wildly indignant, a muddled mess of a movie that most critics despised when it was first released.  I think American Fiction is reasonably good and worth seeing, but it needs to be on a double-feature with Spike Lee's disturbing and hilarious take on the same theme.  American Fiction is competently directed in the standard Hollywood style used for well-made and prestigious pictures -- it's completely bland from a pictorial standpoint, a bit like a made-for-TV movie or TV sit-com.  By contrast, Lee's Bamboozled is a febrile dream studded with spectacularly racist imagery.  It's not fair to attack American Fiction for not being a Spike Lee joint and it has its own merits, including a sort of lucidity and coherence that Bamboozled conspicuously lacks.  But...

(Stagger Lee was a Black pimp who shot a man in St. Louis around the turn of the 20th century; a song was written about the crime and became very popular in a version by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians (!).  The song has been performed by dozens of artists and presents the archetype of the bad, dangerous Black man. American Fiction respects its audience's intelligence and doesn't footnote this reference or the allusion to Thelonious Sphere Monk, the great Jazz man.)

Watch these YouTube videos:  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians "The Happy Wanderer" and, then, "Dem Dry Bones by the same group.  This will lead you to a version of "Dry Bones" by the Harmoniums and, at last, a scary music video from The Singing Detective of the same song.