Review: American Fiction (2023)
Give the people what they want
American Fiction (2023)
Written and directed by Cord Jefferson
from the novel by Percival Everett
This comedy begins as a male African-American writer named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who has published several respected but light-selling serious novels, appears with other serious authors in a lightly-attended panel at a books festival. When he asks where all the readers are, he’s directed to a much larger room where a female African-American author named Sintara is thrilling a room full of enthusiastic readers. Her novel is titled “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” and when she’s asked to read from it, it’s clear that while, like Monk, she speaks college-educated standard English, she wrote the book in African American Vernacular English (AAVE1) and uses it to narrate the lives of young, poor women.
Monk assumes that she has merely appropriated poor black experience and patois, and this angers him — not because he’s concerned about the issue of privileged writers appropriating the experience of less privileged people, but because he assumes she’s pandering to white readers by relying on stereotypes of poor Blacks. It’s clear from his reaction, and from a conversation with his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) that he’ll do anything to keep from being stereotyped as a black author:
ARTHUR: Patrick at Ecco is passing. ... He said: ‘This book is finely crafted, with fully developed characters and rich language, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschlyus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.’ They want a black book.
MONK They have one. I'm black and it's my book.
ARTHUR You know what I mean.
MONK You mean they want me to write about a cop killing some teenager, or a single mom in Dorchester raising five kids.
ARTHUR Dorchester's pretty white now. But yes.
Then a series of family problems besets Monk. His sister dies of a heart attack, and their widowed mother, for whom she cared in the family’s large Victorian house, has Alzheimer’s Disease.
Much as he hates the idea, these expensive problems lead him to write his own, deliberately stereotyped, novel, complete with drugs and violence and titled “My Pafology,” in the voice of a black ghetto2 criminal. Monk has a lot of anger issues, and his frustration with his own career and his envy of Sintara’s success drive him to fill the book with rage, expressed through violent characters and setting. Perhaps this makes the book feel more authentic than it is, since it, too, quickly becomes a best-seller.
But only his agent knows that Monk — publicly known only as a serious author — has penned “Fuck,” which he published under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh3. This pseudonym is one of many ways that Monk signals that the book is simply a joke, but no one makes the connection.
This could be the setup for an absurdist comedy of hidden identity; I was reminded of “Tootsie” (d. Sydney Pollack, 1982), in which Dustin Hoffman goes full drag to get an acting job and only his agent knows the truth. The story is also similar to “The Front” (d. Martin Ritt, 1976), in which Woody Allen plays an unsuccessful writer who agrees to become a front for blacklisted screenwriters; the movie was written by Walter Bernstein and also stars Zero Mostel — both victims, in real life, of the blacklist. There are echoes, too, of “Sullivan’s Travels”: the themes of slumming, confused identity, and giving the people what they want.
But while “American Fiction” gets some laughs from Monk’s hidden-identity dilemma, as well as a black-comedy ending, at least half of the film is about Monk’s family. In addition to his sister’s death and his mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease, there’s a subplot about his younger brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown). Cliff has recently come out as gay and is making up for lost time by partying, but turns serious when confronted with his older brother’s foibles — and how similar Monk is to their remote, judgmental father. After Monk has alienated a girlfriend, Cliff asks him, “Did you shut her out?”
Monk: Yeah.
Cliff: Dad shut everyone out, too. And lied all the time. Look how that turned out.
Monk: I find myself getting very angry these days, like dad.
Cliff: These days??
The scenes of Monk’s family carry the movie’s emotional weight. Moments with Cliff and their mother give Monk, and viewers, insight into his character and his choices.
Despite the quality of these scenes, I was most interested in the ways that “American Fiction,” drawn from the novel “Erasure” by Percival Elliott, raises the question of authenticity and cultural appropriation in fiction. One outcome of this discourse is self-questioning among writers as to whether one has the right to write a story about events one has no personal experience of — for example, if a cisgendered person were to write a story from the point of view of a trans person. (In fact, this dissonance was the basis of one of the first such literary scandals I remember — the discovery by journalist Stephen Beachy that JT LeRoy, the author of autobiographical works about their life as a trans truck stop hooker, was actually a cisgendered white woman.)
Some would say that a writer does not have the right to impersonate someone of another race, or sexual orientation, or lower economic class; one reason given for this stricture might be that such impersonation is an expression of privilege and denies a person who holds that identity a place in the marketplace. Others would say that a writer’s only obligation is to create a believable character and craft a good story. (This question is the subject of an interesting collection of short interviews of well-known writers on the Guardian website.)
These issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation provide the subtext of “American Fiction.” I hoped the movie would confront them more directly, but an explicit discussion of these issues gets only a minute of screen time. Monk and Sintara have each written a book about poor black people who use AAVE, but they have an important difference. Sintara tells Monk that she finds “Fuck” pandering. When he has the temerity to ask her why her book shouldn’t also be considered pandering, given that she also is a college-educated middle-class person, she informs him that her novel is the product of extensive research. It seems as if they’re about to launch into an exploration of the issue. But their conversation is interrupted, and the issues of authenticity and appropriation are never explicitly addressed again.
The film is the feature debut of writer-director Cord Jefferson. It’s not exactly a tight script (you can read it here), but it has the difficult job of balancing the characters’ emotional journeys with the comedy premise. Some reviewers would use the clichéd phrase “the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be,” but I credit Jefferson for not making a pure comedy in the mode of “Tootsie,” which this easily could have been. (And that’s no criticism of “Tootsie.”)
Jeffrey Wright’s performance as Monk is excellent, capturing a range of emotion in an often-repressed main character. Sterling K. Brown as Cliff is a pleasure as well, giving verve to his staccato lines and to his character’s physicality. And special mention to Jenn Harris in a small part as a judge of a literary contest. As an overly scrupulous white woman obeying every politically correct rule, she’s really funny.
I know the word “ghetto” is offensive when used by a white person like myself, but it seems permissable here due to its presence in the title of Sintara’s book and its frequent use by the main character to characterize the stereotyped setting of books which, self-consciously or not, are set in poor Black neighborhoods.
The name Stagger Lee, made famous by a 1959 hit record, is that of a historical figure and one particularly appropriate as a pseudonym here.
I LOVED this movie, especially the way it skewers all kinds of white guilt and white attitudes that are actually racist because they are trying SO hard to NOT be...