Oh, this is mildly embarrassing. I always try to get these reviews out with a day or two of seeing them unless I have something else scheduled for then. But for some reason, I didn’t get around to writing the review for American Fiction, a movie that hit my area on MLK Day weekend and that I saw on MLK Day. I have no explanation for why. I just didn’t write the review. I probably would have seen this in 2023 if it actually hit my area before New Years, but that’s what I get for not living in a major city.
Let me start by saying that American Fiction was well worth the wait for me.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a novelist and college professor put on leave of absence for his overly confrontational demeanor with overly sensitive students. Though his novels are all critically acclaimed, he hasn’t finished one in years, and he’s never exactly been a bestseller. Monk doesn’t want to write the sort of novels that he sees as typical “Black” works that actually seem to garner attention from white readers, namely slavery or ghetto narratives, even as he sees other African American writers, like Issa Rae’s Sintara Golden, gain both audience and critical praise for her work that sounds every bit like the sort of work Monk has been trying to avoid his whole career.
But then other life events intervene. On a trip to visit family in Boston, his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies suddenly. His mother (Leslie Uggams) is showing signs of Alzheimer’s. His brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is not really a position to help after his own divorce and coming out of the closet. It really does come down to Monk’s trying to do something for his mother after avoiding family connections for years. One night, as something of a lark that he intends as some kind of object lesson, he writes the very sort of book he hates and sends it to his agent under a pseudonym, believing that what he considers trash he dashed off overnight could never actually be published. Not only is the book published, it becomes a bestseller, a director (Adam Brody) wants the film rights, and Monk may finally have the financial success he needs to take care of his mother for writing a book he outright despises. But as he keeps the true authorship of a book whose title cannot be used in front of children a secret from everyone but his agent, there’s something more going on here. Monk needs to learn how to actually relate to other people, take care of his family, and try not to be so emotionally reclusive. Can he do that while trying to prove a point?
The trailers for this movie mostly played up the novel Monk wrote like it was some sort of desperate cash grab or something, one that played off all the worst stereotypes of African American life in the present-day United States. Those elements are in the movie, but the fact is Monk hates the book and cannot bring himself to understand why people want to read it all while profiting off the book’s sales. He wants to tell Black stories that don’t fit the usual narrative, and the movie actually does that. Monk’s issues are personal and not at all stereotypical for an African American fictional character. He’s distant from his family, the only one whose “doctor” title comes from a Ph.D. He doesn’t want to share too much of himself with his new love interest Coraline (Erika Alexander). He’s surprised to learn things about his late father that apparently he was the only one who didn’t know. He’s more frustrated than angry, a man who doesn’t want his professional success to be tied to his race. And since he grew up in what looks more like a comfortable upper-middle class existence, he isn’t even all that good at pretending to be this gangbanger type his pseudonym is supposed to be, but he’s often dealing with clueless white folks who can’t tell the difference anyway.
Essentially, this is an often funny character study anchored by a strong performance from Wright. Monk is the sort of character where it isn’t hard to see why people like him when they first meet him but who can boil over at the worst moments and ruin whatever relationships he has. Plus, this movie is pretty damn clever. Brown’s Cliff might be the movie’s ultimate scene-stealer as a recently out-of-the-closet gay man with a bit of a coke problem, but there aren’t any bad performances on display here. Honestly, if this had come out in my neck of the woods in 2023, I probably would have put it at number one for my best of the year list. And then somehow I never got around to writing the review until a week later. I don’t understand me sometimes.
Grade: A
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