All the Wright stuff in understated drama
American Fiction (NR, 118 mins) Directed by Cord Jefferson Reviewed by James Croot **** ½
From voicing What If ...?’s The Watcher to giving Westworld its human conscience in the form of Bernard Lowe, Jeffrey Wright has been one of the unsung heroes of Hollywood in the past 30 years.
Although he won plenty of critical acclaim as the eponymous Basquiat in a 1996 biopic of the world-renowned New York street artist, you’re far more likely to know him from his supporting roles in the Daniel Craig-era Bond movies (where he played CIA agent Felix Leiter), latter-day Wes Anderson tales The French Dispatch and Asteroid City and the latest iteration of Gotham policeman James Gordon in 2022’s The Batman.
But having been such an engaging and scene-stealing, albeit sometimes fleeting, presence in so many movies – everything from The Ides of March to Broken Flowers and Ali – it’s terrific to finally see him in a leading role that allows him to showcase, and audiences to appreciate, the full range of his talents (even if this has inexplicably bypassed cinemas, despite winning the coveted People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and picking up five Oscar nominations).
In writer-director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut (he’s previously worked as a writer on shows like Watchmen and The Good Place), based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, Wright plays Los Angeles university professor and writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison.
A lecturer on American literature with a reputation for provocative teaching methods that haven’t always gone well with students, he also bristles at suggestions he hasn’t published enough. “The speed at which you write proves that good things take time,” he sneers at one of his more prolific colleagues.
It’s not that he hasn’t been writing – novels like The Frog and The Hoss Conundrum are proof of that – it’s just that his latest work has been turned down by nine publishers so far, dismissed for not being “Black” enough.
Urged to take some time off after dismissing a white student’s concerns about his use of the “N” word while discussing stories of the American south (“I got over it, I’m pretty sure you can too,” he chided), reluctantly, Ellison heads to the Mass. Festival of Books, where he’s due to be on a panel of writers.
Already dreading the prospect, the event, for him, is made worse by being in his home town of Boston. That means having to deal with his family.
Sure he gets along with his physician sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), but she’s dealing with a messy divorce, while plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K Brown) has recently come out in a way that didn’t impress his wife and mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who when not jibing him about his weight and expressing concern that he must be depressed, is showing increasing signs of early dementia.
But it’s a rapid series of events that spurs Ellison into action. Stunned by the crowd gathered to listen to young AfricanAmerican author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) discuss the personal inspirations for her Black stereotype-heavy debut We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison is then outraged to find all his works “ghettoised” in the African-American section of a local bookstore (“the Blackest thing about this one is the ink,” he rages, holding up one of his more successful titles), before a family tragedy forces him to stay put – and reflect.
Pouring all his swirling emotions into his laptop, Ellison bashes out a tale of deadbeat Dads, cops and rappers, demanding that his shocked literary agent send out the resulting manuscript penned under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. “I’m not expecting anyone to publish it. I just want to rub their noses in the horseshit they put out,” he explains.
However, his “gag” unexpectedly backfires. when one of them offers a staggering $750,000 for the rights to My Pafology. And they want to meet the “ex-con” and “current fugitive” responsible for its creation.
Those who enjoyed TVNZ+’s Lucky Hank last year will lap up this entertaining and sometimes excoriating look at American academia, the global book industry and US race-relations.
This is a thought-provoking tale that’s also funny and charming in equal measure.
Filled with characters you’ll quickly come to care about and in whose fate you’ll feel invested, Jefferson’s smart script also features a magnificent Roe vs. Wade joke, a fabulous one-liner about non-medical “Doctors” (“Maybe if we need to revive a sentence,” Cliff suggests of the relative usefulness of Ellison’s PhD compared to his siblings’), a brilliant Johnnie Walker-inspired analogy on the types of books that an author can write, and relationships that feel raw and real.
Ross (The High Note) and Brown (This is Us) deliver terrific scene-stealing performances, while Shining Girls’ Erika Alexander shines as the Ellisons’ lakehouse neighbour Coraline and John Ortiz is an absolute hoot as Ellison’s long-suffering agent Arthur (Ad Astra).
Of course, American Fiction is really all about Wright and he deserves all the accolades that have come his way in recent months. Like Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham in The Holdovers, he’s created such a rich, complicated character full of flaws, foibles and fast-wit that, when the end credits roll, you just wish you could spend more time with him.
American Fiction is available to stream on Prime Video.