Now that skies will clear for a while, it’d be a good time for Nevada County movie fans and other residents to get out of the house and indulge in the communal pleasures of the movie theatre. The following is an Oscar Best Picture nominee worth seeing.
In American Fiction (now playing at The Onyx in Nevada City), Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an African American professor of American literature at a Southern California university. He doesn’t just teach African American literature. He teaches the whole menu. His brash approach to the bald racism in the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story drives his touchy-woke white students from his classroom bubbling with tears and lands him in a witty clash with (white) university administrators. The administrators put him on leave until he agrees to properly pander to his predominantly Caucasian student body. (They don’t say that, but the intent is clear.)
Monk is also a novelist, the best kind, one who sets out to write books he wants to read, the ones that dance in that land of freedom called the imagination, free from the fickle dictates of the mass market and crude conformism of politics. (I’ll bet my critic’s pay, he’s a Vladimir Nabokov fan.) Unfortunately, as it was often for Nabokov and so many other high-wire authors, his novels gain high praise as they gather dust on the remainder tables.
Monk’s literary fortunes have sunk to where publishers have started rejecting his books for not being “Black enough.” As an ideal, Monk’s agent Arthur (John Ortiz), points to Sintara Golden’s novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a bestseller acclaimed for its current-day relevance (and for making white readers feel hip for having a conscience). But Monk scoffs at it as trauma porn that exploits and perpetrates stereotypes of Black suffering along with a strait-jacketed view of Black life in America.
Frustrated, Monk heads back east to visit his long-estranged family. The old neighborhood is not a dismal tenement block but a quiet, homey upper-middle class enclave along the Massachusetts coast. There, behind its peaceful facade, Monk finds trauma enough to deal with.
Monk’s father, who favored him over his siblings, committed suicide some years before. His mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) suffers from Alzheimer’s and soon will be unable to care for herself. His brother, Clifton (Sterling K. Brown), a successful plastic surgeon, has just divorced and come out as a gay man. Self-indulgent, ill-tempered, comically wrestling with how to live out his emerging gay self, he suffers the straight-laced Ellison family even less than Monk does. Only the Ellison’s lifelong maid and cook, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who knows all and loves anyway, opens her arms to him.
The one saving grace is Monk’s bantering relationship with his sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a successful doctor who appreciates Monk’s novels for helping fix a wobbly table leg. But right when brother and sister are reaching a rapprochement on caring for Agnes, death takes Lisa away (captured in a moving close-up of a pair of feet shaking on a hospital gurney while Monk helplessly watches). Her passing leaves Monk to bear the burden of his mother’s worsening condition.
Grieving, frustrated, and feeling cornered, Monk seeks revenge on the book industry with a ruthless parody of the life-in-the-ghetto novel the establishment and the marketplace expect from many Black authors: My Pafology. Arthur submits this trolling work anonymously, under the pen name “Stagg R. Leigh,” a supposed real criminal on the run (and also a sharp nod to a classic blues/murder song from the early 20th Century).
Wouldn’t you know it, but a major publisher cluelessly embraces Monk’s lampoon as a raw, authentic portrait of contemporary life. Monk’s attempts to sabotage the deal by retitling the novel Fuck only excites them more. In a page out of Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1966), his purposefully awful book sells for six figures, rockets up the bestseller list, and lands right under the eye of Hollywood.
The good news is Monk no longer must worry about taking care of his Mom. The bad news is the anonymity that once sheltered J. D. Salinger, B. Traven, and Thomas Pynchon from scrutiny is no longer possible in a digital world where no one can hide.
Stagg R. Leigh is not just the newest bestselling author. He’s a celebrity, and celebrity culture demands that Stagg R. Leigh show his face as the glowering fugitive from the pages of Fuck. By this, anti-social Monk is forced into a hilarious act of “gangsta” cosplay, pretending to be wholly made-up figure a world away from his authentic self. Never has selling out carried such a price.
Conscience issues aside, further complications arise when Monk takes part in a New England literary award panel. One of his co-judges is his literary archenemy Sintara Golden, with whom he engages in pointed, well-turned disputes as they pass judgment on some rather interesting books. To ease his loneliness, he kindles a romance with a neighbor, Coraline (Erika Alexander), who becomes increasingly baffled by Monk’s erratic behavior, especially when she brings home a copy of Fuck.
American Fiction is more a comedy-drama than the breakneck Brooksian farce that the previews led me to expect. Right up to its bungled ending, the film strikes a sweet tonal balance similar to an Alexander Payne picture as it weaves its four storylines with remarkable skill and grace. (It would make a good double bill with any of Payne’s films, including this year’s co-nominee for Oscar’s Best Picture, The Holdovers.)
In his directorial debut, Cord Jefferson, adapting the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, nicely plays the music of light comedy with some charming passages, including a scene of the Ellisons playing bocce ball in their backyard, like good bourgeois out of Eric Rohmer. Working with cinematographer Cristina Dunlap and editor Hilda Rasula, he strikes the right comic distance while occasionally warming the screen with colors that convey sincere affection for this fractious family, that, in the end, is pretty much like families all over.
Jefferson has also strung his film with a light array of engaging themes and questions: What exactly do writers (and other artists) owe the world outside the world of their souls? How far can Art compromise with the marketplace and still be Art? And what about those simplistic ideas about the complicated realities about Black life (a question portrayed with often hilarious cringe). It may sound heavy handed, but Jefferson intends to stimulate not provoke and in that he succeeds.
Ideologues may fume, but American Fiction is also a quiet comic protest against the downbeat image of African Americans that often dominates pop culture. In art and culture, there really are almost no rules, nor should there be, no matter how loud the calls for conformity. Monk may be an annoying genius in his frustrated efforts to live and work outside the mainstream, but that’s his right.
Performances are excellent all around. John Ortiz as Arthur, Monk’s desperate conniving agent, scores comic points along with Sterling K. Brown as Clifton, Monk’s hilariously obstreperous brother. Though it was necessary for the story, I regretted the early departure of Tracee Ellis Ross as Lisa. Veteran filmgoers and music fans will groove at the appearance of 1960s popstar Leslie Uggams as Agnes in a performance of great warmth and sympathy. Erika Alexander also does fine work as Coraline, Monk’s romantic interest. Miriam Shor provides more laughs as Monk’s white publisher whose good intentions fail to keep her feet from her mouth.
With Jeffrey Wright, Jefferson has the perfect actor to play Monk Ellison. Wright has been a marvelous chameleon throughout his career, playing everything from computer geeks (Westworld) to comic cardboard generals (Asteroid City). In American Fiction, he shifts with inspiring grace among Monk’s four faces, from snarky academic, through phony hipster criminal, to caring dutiful son, and finally a man in love, while never losing sight of Monk’s core. In the end, he makes Monk authentic, a man who, like all true artists, is stuck with being himself—
Or is he? Because, at the end, and with so much more to work with, American Fiction abruptly swerves from its cheerfully antic premise right into a post-modern pothole for a “meta” ending, a Deus ex machina moment. Here, the work shrivels like a punctured balloon. I’ve not read the film’s source novel, so I can’t speak to whether they’re remaining true to it, but faithful or not, I muttered “Fuck!” as I slumped in my seat. I felt let down as my ex-screenwriter mind set about rewriting it (a habit I usually indulge with things like Mattel Inc.’s Barbie and Don’t Look Up.) Even sympathetic avant-gardists may groan. A movie this good making that kind of mistake is hard to square.
As Monk says early on, good things take time. American Fiction could have taken more, even stretching itself into a limited streaming series. A witty high-comic yarn about how an elaborate act of deception comes hilariously unraveled would be hard to resist, especially in today’s climate. Is it too soon to say “remake”?
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in last year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” appeared in a recent issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. He reviews movies regularly on Medium and he may be found on Facebook.