03/02/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

If these first few weeks are anything to go by, 2024 is going to be a good year for film. Cord Jefferson’s debut feature is a long way from your typical bums-on-seats blockbuster, but the cinema is hearteningly busy tonight. We’re in for a treat.

American Fiction is a clever, cerebral film, exploring the reductive nature of the Black stories that are promoted by white-controlled media. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a Black writer and professor, earning more from teaching than he does from his highbrow books. But in a brilliantly satirical scene, we see his white students complaining that he is making them uncomfortable by explicitly referring to the racist language deployed by the period authors they’re studying. When his white bosses back them up, Monk bristles: he isn’t the sort to back down easily. Before long, he’s been practically ordered to ‘take a break’, and so he heads reluctantly to Boston for a long overdue visit to his family, his employment status decidedly shaky. Is this what happens to Black people when they don’t comply with liberal white people’s notions of how to address racism? Wow.

To add to Monk’s woes, his agent (John Ortiz), calls to say that his latest manuscript hasn’t found a buyer. “It’s not Black enough,” Arthur tells him. “What does that mean?” asks Monk, although he knows exactly what it means. It means that his literary novels don’t conform to the blaxploitation model that white people like to indulge in; it isn’t anything like Sintara Golden’s runaway bestseller, We’s Lives in da Ghetto. As a fawning TV interviewer heaps praise on Golden (Issa Rae), Wright imbues Monk with an understated and entirely credible fury. In Bialystock-Blum mode, he pseudonymously dashes off a ridiculous pastiche of a Black novel and then watches incredulously as it become a huge success. He’d like to take the opportunity to go public and make his point – but his mom (Leslie Uggams) is sick, and someone has to pay for her care…

This well-written and often laugh-out-loud funny script, based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, deftly punctures the self-aggrandising nature of allyship, as white people vie to show off their woke credentials, often at the expense of the actual Black people sitting next to them. It’s also a beautifully-observed depiction of complex family dynamics, as Monk and his doctor siblings (Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K Brown) struggle to deal with their fractured relationships and their mother’s decline. It’s bold, intelligent – and also very accessible. The fourth-wall-breaking final ten minutes are especially audacious, but the entire two-hour run is a joy to behold.

Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, American Fiction is an impressive piece of work, deftly straddling the highbrow/lowbrow chasm that so infuriates its protagonist.

5 stars

Susan Singfield