A sharp showcase for Jeffrey Wright
national Film Festival, the first of many that rang out in the theater. This is a very funny movie, but it’s also a domestic drama that features terrific acting from a supporting cast that includes Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Leslie Uggams. Brown and Wright do the best work of their careers here.
In the introduction Jefferson gave at my screening, he said he wanted to make a movie for everyone to laugh with, including the targets of his satire, namely white audiences and arts powerbrokers who have stereotypical notions about what constitutes Blackness. The satire isn’t as brutal as it could have been — and perhaps needed to be — but overall, I thought “American Fiction” was a rousing success that got me thinking about my own experiences.
Monk’s work appears in the African-American section of bookstores despite having nothing to do with the Black experience. This erroneous categorization angers him to the point where he literally tries moving his books to another section, terrifying the poor clerk in the process. Since Monk’s books aren’t selling anyway, no publisher wants to handle his latest.
Meanwhile, newbie author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) is commanding large crowds at events for her book, “We Lives in the Ghetto,” a novel filled with broken English, characters with names like Ray-Ray, and other Black stereotypes. The book is a huge hit, much to Monk’s chagrin, and Golden becomes an instant celebrity peddling what he thinks are the same, tired tropes about Black people.
So, in a fit of anger, Monk pens “My Pafology,” his own take on the “hood novel.” It’s an over-the-top parody so rife with offensive stereotypes and language that no publisher in their right mind would touch it. As Monk is writing, the great Keith David appears on the screen to act out and workshop the very scene Monk is imagining — even David’s character is confused by the extreme material.
Monk hopes to prove these books are “garbage.” To maintain anonymity, he uses a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, a play on the name of well-known antihero Stagger Lee.
His agent, Arthur (an excellent John Ortiz), doesn’t want to send this hot mess of a book to potential buyers, even though he thinks Monk’s books don’t sell because they’re not “Black enough.”
“It’s got deadbeat dads, rappers, crack, and [the main character] gets killed by a cop at the end,” Monk tells Arthur. “That’s Black, right?”
Of course, the plan backfires; every white publisher and their mother wants to publish “My Pafology.” From there, all hell breaks loose, especially when Monk becomes a diversity hire to judge a book contest with his nemesis, Golden, and several grumpy white authors.
Monk’s actions don’t exist in a vacuum. The aforementioned classroom scene establishes his penchant for being a provocateur. But the joke’s on the student here. Was she that clueless about this branch of literature? O’Connor and Mark Twain didn’t dash out the N-word in their texts (or, for that matter, use the euphemism “the Nword”), so if it bugged her so much, why not take another elective?
Monk’s response is also unsurprising. As someone who has not only seen that word a million times, but has probably been called it just as much, he has as little sympathy for Brittany as I did. I thought, “If she saw my Globe inbox, she would have a stroke.”
I found myself talking back to the movie in my head, and not just in response to all the satirical scenes where I could identify with how much my own Blackness has been used to pigeonhole me, over the course of my writing career, by editors who have either pitched only Black-themed articles to me or expected my film knowledge to consist solely of Madea, Spike Lee, slavery movies, and “Soul Plane.” Running parallel with the jokes is the type of complex and compelling family dramedy we don’t see Black characters in very often. I saw a lot of my family in Monk’s.
“I hate Boston! My family’s there,” Monk complains to university administrators when they demand he take a leave of absence in his hometown. He has been mostly estranged, having left for LA after the death of his philandering father, a doctor. Monk and his father were alike in one regard: They were both emotionally distant people whose anger kept them from getting close to people.
Monk’s family includes his mother, Agnes (Uggams), who is in the early stages of dementia, and his plastic surgeon brother, Cliff (Brown), who has recently come out as gay after his wife busted him in bed with another man and took everything he had in the divorce. Since then, Cliff has gone wild, soothing his pain with sex and drugs.
The one person Monk seems to have a good relationship with is his obstetrician sister, Lisa (Ross). She’s the one holding the family together, so when she dies abruptly, he’s forced to stick around to deal with his issues. Helping him out is potential love interest, Coraline (Alexander), who brings out a softer side of Monk.
“American Fiction” ties these two story lines up with a clever and very meta nod that takes one final swipe at both its topic and the audience’s expectations. Despite one minor misstep (a scene where Golden and Monk air their grievances should have gone on far longer than it does), this is an assured feature debut and one of the year’s best movies.