'American Fiction' is Finally Streaming (And It's Great)
Cord Jefferson's sharp satire about the performance of blackness seems to have the perfect role for all its actors.
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The struggling writer going through a mid-life crisis has long been a staple of American popular fiction, for the obvious reason that crisis-battling writers are generally the ones who create it. In American Fiction, writer and first-time director Cord Jefferson makes it feel fresh. He’s playing with tropes, but mostly with the trope of the human experience.
“Relatability” is overrated; what we really want is specificity, compelling characters, and a clear perspective, all of which American Fiction has in spades. It’s a movie that feels like a novel Richard Russo might’ve written, if Russo could write capably about the performance of blackness. Or an even better comparison, if I could write more capably about contemporary trends in popular fiction. That we’re all constrained by the limitations of our own experience is kind of the whole point.
Jeffrey Wright, in what might be the beau ideal of a Jeffrey Wright performance, plays Jefferson’s proverbial Portnoy, Thelonious Ellison, a frustrated professor and stagnating writer. Thelonious’s friends all call him “Monk,” this play on his jazz great namesake being only the first signifier that Monk carries with him the legacy (and burden) of black excellence, a second-or-third generation professional intellectual whose siblings and peers are all doctors, lawyers, and activists. In one of his first scenes, Monk argues with a student about the Flannery O’Connor short story they’re about to discuss, “The Artificial Nigger.” It’s actually the title itself, written on the white board alone that the (white) student objects to. “We shouldn’t have to stare at the N-word all day,” she pleads. “…I just find it really offensive.”
“With all due respect, Brittany, I got over it,” Monk says. “Surely you can too.”
This incident gets Monk dragged before a tribunal of other annoying intellectuals, who plead with him to do a better job paying lip service to the current fashions of academia, or maybe just take some time off to get his head together and stop snapping at people. Meanwhile, his latest novel, a “reworking of Aeschlyus' The Persians” is having trouble finding a publisher. “They want a black book,” Monk’s agent, played by John Ortiz tells him.
“Do you know that I don’t even believe in race?” asks Monk, incredulously.
Ortiz’s agent too feels like the ideal John Ortiz role (from Ad Astra to The Drop, Ortiz has been one of our always-great unsung character actors for more than a decade now), and it’s a testament to American Fiction’s casting and writing (with co-screenwriting credit to Percival Everett) that every role kind of feels like that.
The implication is obvious though: despite being a black man who has reached the relative heights of his profession, Monk isn’t “black” in any of the familiar, cookie-cutter cliché ways that the white establishment understands (or more importantly, rewards). So he starts to survey the media landscape for the kind of black art they do regard as sufficiently “black.”
He finds it in the form of Sintara Golden, played by Issa Rae from Insecure, the bestselling author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, introduced in a screamingly funny morning show reading of her book, which is naturally full of drug addicts and deadbeat fathers rendered in overwrought street vernacular bordering on minstrelsy.
“‘Yo, Sharonda, where you be goin' in a hurry likes dat?’ D'onna ax me when she seed me comin' out da house. ‘Ain't none yo biznis, but iffin’ you gots to know, I’s goin’ to the pharmacy.’”
This despite Golden being an Oberlin grad who spent the early part of her career as an assistant publisher in charge of reading the “slush pile” of submitted manuscripts (presumably a nod to best-selling authors whose familiarity with the publicity industry seems to buttress their sales, like former TV exec and Fifty Shades author EL James).