American Fiction – Film Review
by Frank L.

Director – Cord Jefferson
Writers – Cord Jefferson, Percival Everett
Stars – Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz

Director Cord Jefferson has adapted the novel “Erasure” (2001) by Percival Everett into what is a first-rate cinema script. It is Jefferson’s first feature film but he worked extensively on many impressive television shows, including Watchmen and Master of None.

Even before the opening credits, he lays out the ground on which the film will rotate – a wry look at the attitude of white America to the issue of race in American literature. He does not hold back. He shows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) giving a lecture to his students on Flannery O’Connor and her short story “The American N*****”. The altercation between Monk and one white female student lays the ground for what follows. Monk is an academic and also moderately successful writer who is struggling with his latest novel. He has standards. His books do not sell well but he has not gone down the road of the black author who writes what appeals, or what the book industry thinks appeals, to a white audience.

Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) has gone down that road and Monk is bewildered by her commercial success. He is so frustrated by these attitudes he decides to write as a joke such a novel and entitles it “My Pafology” under the pseudonym Stagger R. Leigh which is the name of a convicted criminal who is on the run. However, to Monk’s dismay, the book industry loves it and nothing he can do can stop its runaway success.

Meanwhile, his own family life is explored with his divorced sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggaams) who has incipient dementia and his formerly married brother Clifford (Sterling K.Brown) whose wife found him in bed with another man.  They have issues that any family members may face regardless of racial background. Throughout the film, Jefferson has a cornucopia of academics, editors, publishers, producers and directors from the worlds of literature, publishing and film. Each of them is a little delight. In addition, Monk has a romantic interest with one Coraline (Erika Alexander) and the Ellison’s long-standing family retainer Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) finds herself to her surprise being hitched to a long-standing friend Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas).

What Jefferson so skilfully balances is the domestic life of a bourgeois black family with the condescension of the predominantly white academic, literary and film industries when they encounter black individuals who are creative. He does this with a great deal of comedy but he does not get side-tracked. He also has an excellent cast with Wright giving a standout performance. He captures the frustrations of Monk as he handles his faltering career as an academic and as a writer with his domestic responsibilities. It is a complex and demanding role and Wright is a master of it and rightly is nominated for an Oscar for his performance.

American Fiction is both comic and serious. It exposes some commonplace, latent (and not so latent) racist attitudes which it does with shrewd observation. There is a great deal of humour but it makes one reflect on one’s own complacent attitudes about diversity in literature and cinema. It’s a complex piece that deserves your attention.