On a frigid Saturday night over winter break, I had the pleasure of seeing “American Fiction” (2023) at the Bronxville Picture House. The film, set between Los Angeles and a Massachusetts beach house, follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a brilliant yet frustrated novelist teaching American literature at a Los Angeles college. Put on involuntary leave for offending his students and struggling to secure a publisher for his next work, Monk returns to his family home outside of Boston and becomes entrenched in complex discourses of race, generation and romance within his family, all the while penning a parodic stereotypically African-American novel witheringly named “My Pafology.” Monk is a profoundly anti-heroic character; self-justified to a fault and puristic in his creative process, he struggles with perfectionism and the obstinate impulse to write literary novels unrelated to Blackness in a publishing industry content to reduce him to his race. Yet, director Cord Jefferson complicates Monk’s philosophy by depicting his well-heeled upbringing in contrast to popular depictions of Black American life. The Ellison family owns a townhouse in downtown Boston and a breezy beach house; they have a live-in home attendant, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), who has worked for the Ellisons so long she is essentially family; Monk calls his mom Agnes (Leslie Uggams) “Mother” in comically affected New England parlance. For all the hackneyed and harmful portrayals of the Black-American experience that Monk rages against, he is the subject of colorblindness himself, strained by the double consciousness of a privileged, implicitly white-normative upbringing in an industry reducing him to his Black identity.
“American Fiction” hits its stride with its scorched-earth send-up of novels that allegedly wear identity on their sleeve. Incensed that his literary nemesis Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) has a hit with the racialized title, “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” Monk is out for revenge on a world that allows pandering while his “serious” books do not sell. With assistance from his editor, Arthur (John Ortiz), Monk pulls an all-nighter and pumps out a crass parody, sending it to publishers as a tirade against the literary establishment. Monk watches his gag turn into a runaway smash, as he is offered $750,000 for the publication rights—far more than he has ever made off his previous writing. Various attempts at derailing the release of “My Pafology,” including emphatically renaming the novel to the blunt “F*CK,” only bolsters its success, leading Monk into ever-increasing, and often hilarious, hypocrisy.
The film’s tireless sardonicism comes from Jefferson’s barbed writing but rests on the strength of its powerful cast. Wright’s depiction of Monk masters the dialectical pull of humor and sincerity this film demands. Wright delivers incising, sharp quips and punctuates many of the film’s jokes with perfect deadpan reactions. Yet, his hunched body language and awkward demeanor solidify Monk as a character as anguished as he is brilliant. Other cast standouts include Sterling K. Brown’s depiction of Clifford, Monk’s brother struggling through re-examined masculinity and sexuality after coming out as gay in middle age, and Uggams’ moving performance as Monk’s mother succumbing to deteriorative dementia.
“American Fiction” interweaves a range of themes but finds a balance between comedy and drama. Scenes focusing on the publishing industry lampoon white liberal guilt through caustic parody, while Monk’s reflections on writing are somnolent, and his conversations between family members are full of humor, struggling to break through a crushing ennui. Perhaps what I love most about Jefferson’s direction is the combination of these three strains of Monk’s life into one cohesive package. The film’s simultaneous focus on Blackness as it exists in institutions, creativity and family life enriches each context and allows the movie to avoid perpetuating the cliches it is busy skewering. The tragedies and joys that befall the Ellison family, their family politics and the collective traumas that develop across the film give the viewer a rich portrait of the Ellisons that goes beyond a pat racialized worldview. Jefferson’s choice to elide family drama and farce permeates the film’s humor with an irreverent joy and indelible sadness. Key to striking this delicate tonal balance is an instrumental jazz score composed by Laura Karpman, which leverages the cool jazz idiom’s relaxed beauty to lull viewers into a sense of ease. Through the ironic extremes of Monk’s journey and the grief the Ellisons face, the melancholia of Karpman’s score returns as a reminder that the only reasonable reaction to absurdity is acceptance. The choice of an instrumental jazz soundtrack also parallels Monk’s inner journey. Born initially from Black-American expression and considered a debauched and low-brow musical form by the white majority, jazz music gradually ascended to a position of artistic integrity as white artists began performing jazz, culminating in its apotheosis as a high-brow genre. Much like jazz, Monk struggles to reconcile his love of Black culture and representation alongside his ambitions as a literary writer creating high-brow traditionalist fiction.
“American Fiction” ends on Miles Davis’ iconic opening trumpet on Cannonball Adderley’s 1958 rendition of “Autumn Leaves.” The song punctuates Monk driving out of a Hollywood backlot with his brother Clifford after seeing an extra on his lunch break wearing a sharecropper costume. The scene perfectly distills “American Fiction”: a reflection on Black artistic expression set against Black media representation, straddling the line between comedy and lament. Though a scathing indictment of a paradigm where Black creators find success in reciting Black traumas to white audiences, it offers in counterpoint a portrait of a family that weathers the stresses of life without identity or race determining their lives. “Autumn Leaves” is the perfect track to underpin this point—Davis’ trumpet, through bluesy, mellifluous chords, almost speaks to us, essentially saying that life goes on.