American Fiction (2023)

December 10, 2023 11:47 AM

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright)'s writing career has stalled because his work isn't deemed "Black enough." Monk, a writer and English professor, writes a satirical novel under a pseudonym, aiming to expose the publishing world's hypocrisies. The book's immediate success forces him to get deeper enmeshed in his assumed identity and challenges his closely-held worldviews. (Based on Percival Everett's Erasure.)

The (hilarious) trailer is a little misleading--it suggests that this is break-neck, over-the-top satire, but it's more of a satire embedded in a quieter family drama and character study. Would make good companion viewing with Hollywood Shuffle (1987) and Bamboozled (2000).

posted by praemunire (30 comments total)

It is such a pleasure to watch Wright work.
posted by praemunire at 11:49 AM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Definitely looking forward to this one, not just for Wright but also because this is the directorial debut of writer/producer Cord Jefferson, whose work on TV series like The Good Place, HBO's Watchmen, and Master of None was a huge part of their success.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:02 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Discussion of Erasure is here. If you've read it, and seen the movie, how did the adaptation compare?
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:06 PM on December 11, 2023

I have not actually read it, but from what I understand, there is a lot more of the novel in Erasure than there is in American Fiction, which confines itself to a few memorable visualizations of the novel's action. Which makes some sense, in that a satire of Push itself is a lot less interesting in 2023 than a satire of the conditions that made Push possible.
posted by praemunire at 4:33 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is such a pleasure to watch Wright work.

I think he might be my favorite living actor. Percival Everett is one of my favorite living novelists. I've rarely been more excited about a film.
posted by thivaia at 2:33 PM on December 14, 2023

‘American Fiction’ Director Cord Jefferson on Hollywood’s New Shuffle
posted by praemunire at 7:25 PM on December 15, 2023

I'm reading Erasure now. It almost feels as if the main character was written with Jeffrey Wright in mind to portray him in the likely film adaptation.

American Fiction's main cast is excellent and I'm looking forward to seeing their work in the movie (which hopefully will be available on streaming soon).
posted by fuse theorem at 2:24 PM on December 16, 2023

I went into the movie cold, knowing almost nothing about it, but was interested in seeing whatever Jeffrey Wright was doing. It was great. I appreciated the way it was not entirely one thing or another—it had elements of family drama, and internal struggle, and metafiction, and social satire. It all came together.

I'll admit it seems a waste to cast Tracee Ellis Ross and then kill her character off in the first act.
posted by adamrice at 9:57 AM on January 7 [7 favorites]

Who do you think the three white authors were in the award panel? We're they supposed to "be" someone, or just generic author archetypes?
posted by lizjohn at 8:37 AM on January 16

Good question. I think they're meant more as archetypes--the Roughneck, the 'Enlightened' White Woman, the Prim Professor. I started to give examples, but really it's take your pick on all of them except maybe the first, where there tend to be fewer white examples.
posted by praemunire at 2:03 PM on January 16

So so good. One of my favorite movies in a long time! Agree with others about how it was doing a couple different things at the same time and did that so well, and then how it had some meta commentary on the form and on itself was just perfect.

One of my many thoughts what watching the siblings interact, especially the sister, was how rarely we see adults convincingly being adults in movies. These are just human adults with a history being real people. In fact they are more beautiful and witty than most people but their lives just feel like real lives.

Great performances all around but the runaway star to me was Leslie Uggams. She utterly embodied this charismatic, controlling, whip-smart, subtly cruel, steely, beautiful person so well, and the dementia portrayal was incredibly real with no melodrama.
posted by latkes at 2:39 PM on January 21 [4 favorites]

One of my many thoughts what watching the siblings interact, especially the sister, was how rarely we see adults convincingly being adults in movies.

I was thinking something like this on a rewatch about Monk and Coraline's relationship. They have sex on their second (rounding up, even!) date. It's not played pruriently or prudishly or even as this huge relationship landmark. It's just a thing that happens, as it can happen with people their age who like each other.
posted by praemunire at 8:33 AM on January 22 [6 favorites]

Picks up four major Oscar noms: Best Picture, Best Actor (Wright), Best Supporting Actor (Brown), and Best Adapted Screenplay. It's finally opened "widely," so this will be your best chance to see it.
posted by praemunire at 1:16 PM on January 23

it was doing a couple different things at the same time and did that so well, and then how it had some meta commentary on the form and on itself was just perfect.

Definitely it was juggling multiple balls. I really liked the concept and wish it had not ended just as it was starting to fall apart/fall together. I would have liked a bit better idea of how much was real and what was fiction. OTOH my husband deals much better with ambiguity than I do and he absolutely loved it and wouldn't change a thing.
posted by beaning at 2:21 PM on January 23 [3 favorites]

I think the whole thing is real, up to the final scene with the director where there are different possible endings imagined. Monk explicitly contrasts what really happened with what might happen with the more genre endings (e.g., "the real Coraline won't return my calls"). The only thing I'm not completely sure about is if he went up to the stage and grabbed the award at all--I believe he says "I turned and walked out," which I guess could've been before or after going up to the stage. But his brother knows at the end that he's just pitched a film about his actual experience, because he jokes about who they're going to cast as him (and Monk's joking response calls back to a conversation depicted earlier in the movie and wouldn't be funny without it), so I think his identity as author of Fuck must have gotten out, presumably because he took the award.
posted by praemunire at 3:44 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

I expect the movie is intended to be two side-by-side stories but I find adding another layer so it's a story-within-a-story-about-a story covered a few things I found otherwise unresolved, in an overthinking way-not in a nit-picking way. So at some point Monk tells Wiley that this is a fake story, given the "how should this end" issue, right? But when did he do so and how does/does this alter what we see? Is what we see the film as written by Monk/Wiley? (Harking back to Maynard's comment that Monk should write for Hollywood)? The time frame to me is unclear given the need for mom's treatment vs the lack of family money to immediately pay for it, the lack of selling either house given the need for money, the brother's use of drugs is raised then dropped, the sister's death occurs but is not further really mentioned other than an aside, the way the family handled the drug using guests at the wedding house, etc. But I'm overthinking I expect and I greatly appreciated we got a tight 2 hr movie rather than an extended 3 hr one.

Things I really liked: the mother-son dance at the care center, the romance between Lorraine and Maynard, that Coraline told him to leave and he left, and Sintara and Monk's talk about their respective books.
posted by beaning at 4:29 PM on January 23 [3 favorites]

So at some point Monk tells Wiley that this is a fake story, given the "how should this end" issue, right?

I don't know why you'd assume that. A film especially can be based on actual events without hewing to them exactly. Wiley wants the ending with the maximum possible impact (from his point of view) and doesn't really care about how accurate it is. But when rejecting Monk's proposed ending, he actually asks him, "What did you do?" That would be a meaningless question if the whole thing was made up. (Also note that without the events in the film having happened, Monk would not have had the connection to Wiley. He didn't even know who he was.)

I'm also not sure why you're confused about the money issue. He got a $750K advance on the book! Even with the agent's cut and taxes, he probably still got a check for north of $300K, which would take care of any immediate financial worries. The action of the film spans a couple of months at least, probably more (I think Coraline says during their fight that he's been "acting like a weirdo for months," but it might've been "weeks"), so while he might've gotten the check a little bit faster than he would've in reality, the timing wasn't insane.

A film like this, which does aspire to light naturalism in the family drama, isn't going to tie up everything with a bow. Life doesn't resolve every family member's issues at the same time.
posted by praemunire at 4:48 PM on January 23

I really enjoyed this movie, but the family drama bits were every bit as much of a parody/satire as the rest of it. The Sideways references were many and obvious.
posted by spudsilo at 9:01 PM on January 28

I don't think there are enough of these stories involving, specifically, even moderately affluent Black families for it to be able to be a parody or satire, and I find the Sideways comparison kind of weird.
posted by praemunire at 5:18 PM on January 29 [4 favorites]

I read the book. It doesn't just have the complete text (I think) of My Pafology/Fuck, it had Monk's professional literary criticism. I couldn't stand reading either of them.

I *think* both _Fuck_ and _We All Live in da City_ are written in wrong versions of AAVE, but my ear isn't good enough for details to be specific. They might even be in different wrong versions.

In the book, Monk's sister dies because she's shot for working for Planned Parenthood. I don't remember whether she did abortions. My guess is that it was decided that was such strong stuff that it would unbalance the movie, so she had a heart attack instead.

I have mixed feelings about the movie ending-- in the book, Monk is heading toward the podium-- maybe just deciding whether to head toward the podium, and neither he nor we know what he will say. I would would like the story where he admits to having written Fuck, and then we see how everyone reacts.

The movie ending was so dramatically violent that it was emotionally overwhelming. I have no idea whether it was supposed to be an example of the hated trauma porn.

I also wish Monk had asked Sinatara about writing about people like the ones she knew from from real life. Or ordered her to-- he could be pretty brusque.

I wonder whether there are any Easter eggs from classical literature in the movie.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:53 AM on February 1 [1 favorite]

My guess is that it was decided that was such strong stuff that it would unbalance the movie, so she had a heart attack instead.

Probably a fair call. But the manner of her death still subtly underlined the precariousness of black well-being even among the affluent in this country--she's a doctor in her 50s (and on the young side of that, I'd say), it's shocking that she should be having a heart attack. But clearly a lifetime of stress has taken its toll.

The movie ending was so dramatically violent that it was emotionally overwhelming. I have no idea whether it was supposed to be an example of the hated trauma porn.

You mean the shooting, right? Yes, of course! Also, overwrought and absurd. (Weirdly, this means it would have been perfect for the version of this story written in German in the 1920s about a white provincial intellectual selling out to write popular fiction...) You can see the callback to the death of Ricky in Boyz N the Hood that Monk watches on the "diversity of black stories" program earlier in the film.

I'm not an expert on AAVE, but the language the fictional novels use sounds more dated than wrong--remember that Push was published in 1996 and Erasure in 2001 and even then I expect their dialect sounded a little archaic and 70s (with the "if'n" and the use of an "-s" ending on singular verb and "I is" instead of "I be").
posted by praemunire at 11:30 AM on February 1

I was disappointed by this film. I didn't like the main character one bit, which didn't help. I thought Coraline was completely one-dimensional. Wasn't she meant to be a defence attorney? We saw nothing of her other than as a foil to Monk.

The best part for me was seeing Sterling K Brown - who I'd only ever seen as the uptight Randall in This is Us - completely let loose. I thought he was great.

But otherwise, yeah, not my thing.
posted by essexjan at 3:02 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]

> I *think* both _Fuck_ and _We All Live in da City_ are written in wrong versions of AAVE, but my ear isn't good enough for details to be specific. They might even be in different wrong versions.

I'm an ESL speaker and don't live in the US, so my exposure to AAVE is mostly from media. Having said that, my immediate impression is that it was a deliberately clumsy "minstrel AAVE".

Contrast with Wright's portrayal of Monk-as-Stagg in his first meeting with Riley. Shifty, avoiding eye contact, but also perfect as a man out of place and tryingto fit in, and he's doing it three times:
- Wright pretending to be Monk, of course
- Monk pretending to be Stagg
- Stagg trying to keep a low profile

Even Monk's "slip" when ordering white whine isn't such, and it's a nice detail from the writers: why wouldn't a black criminal drink wine? How many criminals does Riley, he'll, how many criminals do _you_, member of the movie watching public, personally know?

Everyone in this movie is someone pretending part time to be a bunch of ad-hoc someone elses.

The movie triumphs over its tonal shifts because of how well the writer/director and cast juggle all these versions of the characters, and also of the stereotypes they choose to reject or embrace, reluctantly and for money in Monk's case.

I'm watching it again tonight because I feel the first view only scratched its surface.
posted by kandinski at 3:58 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]

"At least she's not white this time."
"Your wife was white!"
"Beards don't count."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:39 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]

I didn't expect to like this movie as much as I did. Really funny and interesting with a film that is playing out on many levels. The Meta-ness of a film based on a book which is about another book and another film and also refers to itself, breaks my brain a bit.

I adore Percival Everett which is what led me to go see this. His book The Trees is I think his best work. You sense where the book is taking you but it still hits you pretty hard nonetheless.
posted by vacapinta at 5:59 AM on March 11 [3 favorites]

I liked this but I felt like I wanted something more. I think I got teased by Monk writing a dad-shooting scene in My Pafology and I was like, oh this is some nice bleed, it'll be interesting if this develops. But the movie steps back, and the scenes where he is forced to pretend to be his pseudonym are played pretty straightforward too.

The political line walked with Lorraine was interesting; a black servant of a black family. When I think about servants I think of like, how do they plan for retirement, how terrifying is this end of service hoping for some shower of largesse; these jobs are so at the whim of the people they work for, that power seems so terrible. I think Maynard showing up with a parachute was pretty convenient. Maybe too a bit of mismatch between Monk's dread of his family at the beginning of the movie and his reflexive and virtuous "Lorraine is family" stance; does he really know what family is? I guess so.

The blatant shittiness of the guy running the Literary Awards was funny. I liked how it came down to Monk and Sintara Golden getting outvoted. I liked the ending of the movie I guess; the nodded-to actor is not a literal slave, but he's still trapped in this racial role.

I can understand a little wanting there to be another layer of satire here because the movie is otherwise a pretty feel-okay dram-com-rom. That's what I was in the mood for though; I really just wanted Monk to get away with it and people to be happy, and that's what I got.
posted by fleacircus at 8:52 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

Lorraine's situation/positionality was interesting (thought that "don't you want the apron?"/polite "fuck no!" bit was a nice touch), but just to note that unless the family paid her under the table (hope not!), she would have Social Security benefits like everybody else. And, as she seems to have been a live-in, she wasn't exposed to the huge escalation of rents in the Boston area since 1995 when rent control ended. As domestic workers go, she probably had a decent deal.
posted by praemunire at 12:37 PM on March 16

Fortunately Maynard arrives and her material circumstances never need to be considered at all!
posted by fleacircus at 2:35 PM on March 16 [1 favorite]

Maynard arrives

Maynard appears to be private security at the kind of place that would keep a man in his 60s on as security. I doubt he's all that well off. Perhaps he has a pension from his military service.
posted by praemunire at 6:39 PM on March 16

Perhaps they win the lottery a few moments after the movie is over. We can think of whatever we want, but I don't think that changes what's on the screen.
posted by fleacircus at 6:53 PM on March 16