American Fiction

Or: Notes from a Dyspeptic Son

Based on Perceive Everett’s novel Erasure, American Fiction tells of a story of family trouble, Black beauty and white idiocy. Thelonious “Monk” Ellis (Jeffery Wright), a stern Black author is a man beset with troubles. His books do not sell, his students are too sensitive, his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) health is failing, and he and his siblings Lisa (Tracy Ellis Ross) and Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) are unbalanced by a traumatic childhood. This stew of disquiet, with the final garnish being Monks’ resentment of popular author Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae) author of a best selling but (perhaps) exploitative novel, froths over into a the creation of a novel and persona which will rocket him to uncomfortable heights.

The movie is nominally about Monk’s clashes with the white American establishment, with a cast of self congratulatory idiots (special mention goes to Miriam Shor as a tongue tied publishing exec). And to be sure there are loads of lines and images that so searing you have to snatch your gaze away, even while laughing uncontrollably (because there is no other answer, and besides its a quality joke). But in reality this portion of the movie is best summed up by Monk’s agent Arthur (John Ortiz): “White people say they want the truth, but they just want to be absolved.”and these are sparks of satire fall back into the shine of a family drama. Wright balances bafflement and resentment, a hurt kid armored in intelligence and bafflement who is slowly undone by Ross and Brown as each of them hashes out their own mess.

The movie is a little too much based like a book, with padding scenes and a noticeable amount of polish on the dialog. It hits its stride halfway in a scene of Monk at work on his execrable novel. Conjuring two characters from his imagination (Okieriete Onadowan and Keith David) each break the crafting of the scene about how ridiculous their dialog sounds, but also sinking a little bit more of Monk into the page than he would like. It marries the two different halves of the movie, the electric satire and the modulated character study, that otherwise spiral around each other, each superb with a gap between.