Director: Cord Jefferson
Writers: Cord Jefferson and Percival Everett
Stars: Jeffrey Wright, Skyler Wright, John Ales
Synopsis: A novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.
In Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, it satirized American TV and content that isn’t really Black enough and used racist stereotypes to improve their ratings. In what feels like a spiritual sequel, Cord Jefferson, in his directorial debut, makes the same point with literature. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, Jefferson makes one of the best directorial debuts in recent memory with this stinger on how White readers still judge Black writers for what their content is about, as opposed to writing skills. One of the best screenplays this year by Jefferson adds an intelligence that bears a lot of fruit in story and satire that feels straight from Mad TV.
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a professor and author based in California who is struggling to get his work published because, according to his agent (John Ortiz), it isn’t “Black enough.” The example of what type of Black novel that is getting published comes in Monk attending Sintara Golden’s (Issa Rae) reading of her book titled “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.” White women give a standing ovation in front of Monk, who then sees his books in a bookstore not in the Black Lives section because his subjects are not about the genre considered as such. Being shafted for books which use Ebonic lingo and use tropes that have always been connected to Black stories angers Monk so much that he decides to write his own book called “My Pafology” under a pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. To his surprise, his book gets picked up.
Meanwhile, Monk has returned home to Boston to attend to his ailing mother’s dementia while reuniting with his siblings Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) who has unceremoniously come out of the closet. A sudden tragedy keeps Monk for the longterm in Boston and he is forced to tie up the affairs at his mother’s house. He then meets his mother’s neighbor, Coraline (Erika Alexander), which kindles a possible romance for the lonely author. With his brother’s outing causing consequences for himself too, Monk has to juggle many things, but nothing more important than his mother. That joke of a book he has written is now Monk’s way to pay for the expenses.
The range of Wright’s acting in comedy and drama is in full swing when dealing with the switching tones of the story and he does it with such ease. Ellison is someone who has pretended to be another person he is nowhere close to – a wanted convict who the FBI are now trying to locate. Having to degrade himself in this character, such as his suggestion for what the new title should be for his book, shows a tragic comic crisis of faith for Ellison. It is one of Wright’s best performances on screen, who has the right balance of confidence and melancholy dealing with these various problems. Brown is terrific as well, a tragic character that Monk has empathy for but finds Clifford’s behavior too erratic while dealing with his personal fallout.
What we have in the end is another conversation about racial profiling and stereotypes, but not as serious. Jefferson amazingly pulls out the right moments from Everett’s novel in laying down the difficult points that still affect how Black people are perceived. The great trick of it all is that Jefferson perfectly uses humor in the right places to get us through the story that does not stall nor does it lay it thick on viewers. American Fiction won the People’s Choice Award at Toronto and at Middleburg, which says how much people across the board will enjoy this film when it comes to theatrical release.
