"American Fiction": An Entrée, or a Main Course?
Does Cord Jefferson's feature debut, "American Fiction", know what it wants to say or what kind of film it wants to be?
American Fiction, Cord Jefferson Cunningham (2023)
Around halfway into American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, there’s a moment when a literary agent says that “nobody in Hollywood reads”. When a studio filmmaker comes to translate a novel to the screen, “they get their assistants to read things and then summarise them. The whole town runs on book reports”. This dislodged the proverbial penny so that it finally dropped, and I thought, “That’s what’s wrong with this film.” Not that I think Jefferson didn’t actually read Everett’s novel, but the excoriating, frenetic original has been so diluted and sanitised for the screen that it plays like the visual book report of someone who didn’t engage very deeply with the material, and who finds parts of it distasteful. As a result, things are rather safe here.
But let’s take this from the top, and also with what there is to enjoy in American Fiction – of which there’s plenty. Jeffrey Wright is heartfelt as Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, professor and writer of unread literary novels. Wright brings so many layers to Monk’s anger – revealing at different times rage, envy, hatred, spite, and every other flavour of both righteous and undeserved fury – that it’s impossible to look away whenever he’s on screen.
In fact, all the performances are phenomenal. Stirling K. Brown, as Monk’s recently divorced and just-as-recently outed brother, is consistently dazzling. He’s somehow charming even as he’s narcissistic, convincing us that those around would, as they do, love him in spite of his occasional coarseness. Brown has a couple of stand-out scenes, and somehow he supercharges these brief moments without ever overdoing it. He brings fresh vitality to an otherwise familiar speech about wishing their dead father had known who his son really was. And when their mother, sliding into dementia, dances gently with him before looking up into her son’s eyes and saying, “I always knew you weren’t a queer” – my god, Brown’s restraint is perfectly pitched against the strength of the audience’s heartbreak.
Their mother, played by Leslie Uggams, is captivating as she descends from savvy matriarch to vacant shell, staring forever at some infinity above and beyond her vision. The way she delivers that devastating line about her son’s sexuality is so nuanced: is she being intentionally cruel, or reassuring herself, or trying to convince her son, and does she really mean it, is this what she’s always thought, or is this the Alzheimer’s speaking? This single line and its delivery offer more complexity, and are more interesting to consider, than the film’s gimmicky postmodern ending(s).
With Monk’s sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), we get another impressive performance, though it’s cut short by her death in the first act. It’s a death that shows up a great deal of where the film goes wrong. In the book, Lisa’s an abortion provider murdered by an anti-choice nut-job; in the film, she’s a doctor who dies of the most bathetic on-screen heart attack. This isn’t a problem because it deviates from the novel, it’s a problem because it’s just not very interesting. American Fiction is an emollient version of Everett’s blistering novel; Jefferson adds a sprinkling of sugar that softens the sourest notes of the original.
There’s a whole storyline (arguably the central storyline) about Monk writing a parody of “black trauma porn” and white people eating it up that is utterly secondary in quality and engagement to the “supporting” family storyline. Throughout American Fiction, there’s a lot of implied family history (and a little of it made overt in passing dialogue). I kept waiting for, hoping for, flashbacks to develop the absent-father storyline, or the cheating husband/father storyline, or the mother doing her best to raise three kids after the suicide of her husband storyline. Any one of these would surely have been more compelling than the “white people suck and publishing sucks too” storyline. But that’s the one we got.
In fact, I began to notice that every time the film went back to that plot about the wokeness of the publishing industry, even aspects of the film I’d praised suddenly got a little worse. There are a number of audio clichés in the opening section, such as the whistle of mic feedback on the reveal that a book conference has a tiny audience. The score, which in the family scenes is haunting and wistful, with melancholic flute sections, becomes the tumbling, popping kind of soundtrack that telegraphs “witty” and has been used countless times before. Even Wright, who is wonderful generally, is often reduced in the publishing sections to mugging at the camera, giving a one-note rendition of an awkward guy pretending to be “ghetto”.
American Fiction seems anxious to make sure every audience member gets that it’s a satire, to the extent that the popping colours, aforementioned score, and the timing of certain beats are always screaming, “Comedy!” A few lines made me chuckle, a bunch of them made me groan, and far too many washed over me as I realised they were supposed to be funny. If you like the self-congratulatory “comedy” of Saturday Night Live – the mash-up of infantile humour with high-minded politics – you’ll probably find American Fiction to your taste. The best of the humour comes in the moments between the family’s estranged members, when the humour is more about revealing the dynamics between siblings than reassuring the politics of its audience.
Ultimately, there’s something insubstantial about American Fiction, especially in the places it takes itself most seriously. Even its try-hard efforts at translating Everett’s postmodern hijinks to the screen left me wanting. The multiple endings trick, rather than making any great thematic point, only underscores the film’s ambivalence about what it’s trying to say and do: is it anti-woke, as when Monk complains about how “goddamned delicate” his students have become, or is it progressive in its incessant send-ups of white people? Is this a film about a family trying to come together as it falls apart, or is it about racial politics in the twenty-first century? Or is it offering just enough of each to satisfy a range of viewers, so long as they don’t want anything of much substance?
In the end, American Fiction serves up a few morsels you want to taste a lot more of, but the whole thing feels more like an entrée than a main course. This is, after all, Cord Jefferson’s feature directorial debut. Maybe next time, the chef will cook up something that fills the belly.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe