More successful as a quiet, nuanced family drama than a broad social satire, American Fiction stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a talented novelist with middling sales who embarks on a cathartic creative project: writing the sort of stereotypical, “Black” story full of trauma, poverty, crime, and violence that has been shooting up bestseller lists. (He first titles it “My Pathology,” but switches to “My Pafology.”) The catch? When he publishes it under a pseudonym, the book becomes a hit, earning Monk lots of money, along with an increasingly sick stomach. Anyone who’s seen Spike Lee’s underrated 2000 film Bamboozled—which brazenly demonstrated how this sort of minstrelsy persists in Hollywood—will likely find the social satire obvious and fairly toothless. Far better are the scenes with Monk and his family, whom he has kept at a distance but must connect with due to a series of tumultuous developments. These are the moments Wright especially shines—subtly revealing the selfishness beneath Monk’s professional self-righteousness—while we also get lovely supporting turns from the likes of Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown, and Erika Alexander. Directed by Cord Jefferson, making his feature debut, adapting a 2001 novel by Percival Everett.
(12/19/2023)
