A review of the new film “American Fiction”
This is an African-American work in the sense that the source material (the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett), the writer and director (Cord Jefferson in a feature-film debut), almost all the actors, and the subject material are all African-American.
But this is not “The Color Purple”; instead the message of the movie is that most white people only encompass black narratives if they are stereotypically about slavery, poverty or gangsterism. So the lead character, Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, is an African-American professor of English who struggles to have his fiction work sold because it is insufficiently stereotypically black. In this role, Jeffrey Wright (whom, I confess, I only know from recent James Bond films where he played CIA agent Felix Leiter), is wonderful and, in an impressive support cast, watch out for Sterling K Brown as ‘Monk”s gay bother.
“American Fiction” is part social satire (the fiction in writing) and part family drama (the roles we play and the secrets we keep). In the former capacity, the film asks us to rethink how people of colour are presented in storytelling media. In the latter sense, we look at the different ways in which we reveal ourselves to family and friends and the benefits of openness and trust. So there is a lot going on here, but the style is light and enjoyable and the ending deliciously multi-choice.