Early in “American Fiction,” as novelist Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) struggles to understand why his latest manuscript keeps getting passed over, his agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tells him that his books just aren’t Black enough. Monk is Black, but he is not Black in the publishing world due to his erudite perspective and disinterest in writing for predominantly white audiences about the experience of being Black. In this same scene, Monk insists to Arthur that he doesn’t even see race, just as the cab he’s hailed is stolen by a white person.
Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” television writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut has been marketed as an arch satire on racial representation in the media. It has clear stylistic and tonal tethers to films like Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle” and Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled,” the latter film being a direct inspiration to Everett’s book. But unlike Everett, Townsend, or Lee, Jefferson seems less interested in the story’s satirical elements than he is in attempting to have his cake and eat it, too.
The premise for the film surrounds Monk’s frustrations with his career in the face of success for, in his mind, worse books designed to pander to the white gaze. Issa Rae plays Sintara Golden, a novelist whose new book “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto” has set the publishing world on fire. It’s an exaggerated melodrama with comical dialogue that would feel like parody if it weren’t being devoured by white audiences who feel compelled to listen to authentic Black voices. But, as Monk often complains, to those readers, “authentic” just means poor, uneducated, and typified by the persistent proximity to violence, death, and tragedy.
Monk fires back at this phenomenon by jokingly penning a book called “My Pafology,” a self-satisfied stab at the kind of book publishers seem to want, with all the drug dealing and gun-slinging he can muster. It ends up selling for more than anything he has ever written, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a fabrication Arthur embellishes to be a fugitive on the run who can only do interviews over the phone or via witness protection muffled video chat. This plot is entertaining and central to the novel; however, it feels significantly less vital to the final picture than the film’s marketing material would have one believe.
Everett’s novel presents Monk’s life diaristically, juxtaposed with prose designed to ape books like Sapphire’s “Push.” It poses questions about the validity of literary fiction against its more populist brethren. The melodramatic tenor of Monk’s family life, in some ways, parodies a certain kind of staid, serious novel right alongside the book’s more overt targets. But Jefferson tones all that down, instead focusing on Monk’s family life in a more measured and reserved way.
Rather than push Monk’s non-writing subplots into heightened theatrics, the film explores his personal relationships earnestly and patiently. We see him bonding with his sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and coming to take care of his ailing mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams). There’s a warmth and a sweetness to the complexity of these relationships, with Wright flexing different muscles as an actor, playing a prickly but lovable straight man, while Sterling K. Brown gets to go broad as his brother, Cliff, a plastic surgeon having a midlife crisis. Erika Alexander also does excellent work in the supporting cast as Monk’s love interest, Coraline, a woman who loves his books but has to fight to climb the walls he puts up.
These scenes feel like they come from the sort of movie Monk wishes could be made, an earnest and touching drama about a Black family without having to be a “Black” story. But as easy as it feels to get swept up in Monk’s life, the story has to keep darting back to the journey of publishing “My Pafology.” The film is mostly concerned with the easy jokes that come from skewering white readers and the strange way they engage with Black media. By the time Monk and Sintara have a debate about the merits of his book in the final act, it feels like Jefferson realizes how far he’s strayed from the film’s thesis, and he’s trying to make up for it by stuffing these characters’ mouths to parrot its deeper themes directly.
While there are some good laughs to be had, they’ll be severely undercut for anyone seeing this film in a theater, as the auditorium will likely be populated by the very white viewers the movie wants to lambast. Whether or not they can sense that they are the butt of the joke will have little bearing on how deflating their guffaws will be for the film’s attempts at satire.
“American Fiction” is a film that fails to balance its satiric origins with the tragicomic story it seems far more interested in telling. That shift in focus weakens it as a sharp critique of racial representation in fiction and cinema, but it’s difficult to complain about that when the film gathers so many talented actors to tell a lived-in tale about family trauma and the risks inherent to any sort of intimacy. One imagines a funnier, more entertaining film that’s a more direct adaptation of “Erasure,” but that theoretical picture pales in comparison to a potential movie that is nothing but Monk’s family and their lives, with the easy gags about “White Fragility” left elsewhere.
“American Fiction” is currently playing at The Charles (1711 North Charles St., thecharles.com) and will go into wider release in the coming weeks.