American Fiction has been slightly over-shadowed among this year’s Oscar nominees by more high-profile movies like Oppenheimer, Barbie, Poor Things and others.
But it’s up for five awards, including Best Film, Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright, Best Script and Music. Which is why I’m a little puzzled it went straight to streaming service Prime Video here.
Thelonius “Monk” Ellison – played by Jeffrey Wright – is a respected author and academic. Respected rather than best-selling. He’s too literary to be a popular Black author. But, as a Black American author, he’s too often placed in the Afro-American Studies ghetto of the bookshops.
Jeffrey Wright Photo: Screenshot
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You get the idea this was also a regular occurrence for original author, Percival Everett, and to first-time film director Cord Jefferson, hitherto a TV writer. All three felt pressure to write the sort of thing best-selling author Sintara Golden turns out in American Fiction.
Monk actually goes to one of Sintara’s book-readings, where he’s surrounded by mainly middle-class, white readers, thrilled by her authentic voice.
Except, Sintara’s background seems pretty much as bourgeois as that of her audience. “Straight from the Hamptons”, as they say.
Monk is depressed – not just at the hypocrisy, but at the limited options he sees open to him. It’s not as if he doesn’t want a wider readership. He’s sick of the academic world – his back-biting colleagues and the blinkered students he has to teach.
He also has issues with his family - his siblings and his increasingly erratic mother.
All these things conspire to push him into writing what the market seems to want.
So, for the people who lapped up Sintara Golden’s We’s Lives in da Ghetto here’s My Pathology. No, scrub that. My Pafology.
As a bitter joke, he sends it to his agent Arthur, who, as a black man himself, is appalled.
But as an agent, he fires it off to a bunch of publishers. The publishers who were so lukewarm about Monk’s recent literary work. And wouldn’t you know it…
They love it, needless to say. It ticks every available box – diversity, apparent authenticity, gangster chic, white guilt and the added frisson that the newly-named Stagg R Leigh may in fact be a runaway criminal.
And once he’s on the gravy train, Monk finds himself having to go with it.
American Fiction may look, at first glance, like a one-joke comedy – a good joke, mind you, but essentially “how long can our hero get away with his scam?” But it’s not that, or at least not just that.
The theme is racism, of course, but more the expectations racism demands.
In fact, all the characters in American Fiction fight against these stereotypes – the fact that Monk’s entire family are doctors, for instance, even if his doctorate is in English.
The obvious target of American Fiction is the smug, liberal white audience. Watching wealthy publishers and movie producers thrilling at the chance to engage with racial politics – so long as they don’t have to be the ones saying it – is often excruciating.
The best thing in the film is the great Jeffrey Wright as Monk. After years of adding class to everything from The Hunger Games and James Bond to the movies of Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson, Wright is finally front, centre, the whole thing in American Fiction.
He won’t win an Oscar - not this year anyway, the ambivalent ending of American Fiction will see to that.
But by missing out, maybe he’ll be given a chance at a simpler, more Oscar-friendly role next time.