American Fiction nabbed the People’s Choice Award at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival. I wasn’t there, but I would probably have voted for it too. After all, the film—by writer-director Cord Jefferson in an assured cinematic debut—touches with sardonic glee on several subjects all too familiar to me, including academia and the wonderful world of book publishing. But American Fiction is also much concerned with racial matters, and with the delicate question of who is entitled to tell whose stories. I can’t pretend to appreciate, as an outsider, what it’s like to be a Black intellectual in today’s America. But for me American Fiction is a prime example of how to make a funny but pithy small movie (the kind Alexander Payne does so well), while also weighing in on important matters of today. Timely? You bet.
Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, PhD (an unforgettable Jeffrey Wright) isn’t doing so hot. At the California university where he teaches English and creative writing, a white student berates him for assigning a Flannery O’Connor short story with the n-word in its title. The self-righteousness of this generation of students, it seems, is wearing him down. His fellow faculty members don’t show much sympathy for his unwanted position as the campus point-person for all things Black, but do remind him that he hasn’t published a new novel in years. (A scholarly and self-contained man, he tends to write lyrical books with allusions to the mythology of the ancient Greeks. Being cutting-edge hardly interests him.) Because he has an upcoming trip to the east coast to help judge a literary competition, he reluctantly accepts his colleagues’ strong suggestion that he take a leave and spend time with family.
Ellison’s family members are not his favorite family. I won’t go into detail and spoil plot surprises, but they’re a fractured bunch, full of grudges and resentments. They are, though, impressively well educated. His late father was a medical doctor, as are his two (very complicated) siblings. They live well, spending time at a wonderful old summer place at the New England shore. Their Black heritage is important to them, philosophically speaking, but there’s no way they feel much personal connection to the whole ghetto experience. In the course of his stay, Monk visits his literary agent, only to discover that no one wants to publish his latest manuscript. He is, he discovers, just not “Black” enough to satisfy editors looking for the next best-seller. That’s when an evil impulse strikes him, and he begins to write—at white heat, one might say—a raw, raging narrative full of every cliché (guns! drugs! bad grammar!) of inner-city African-American life. Pretty soon he’s facing an unexpected dilemma: how does he turn down a small fortune in advances and the sale of movie rights for a novel he doesn’t want to claim as his? (His literary agent certainly has something to say about the choice he ends up making.)
The plot thickens as Monk takes on family responsibilities, finds (maybe!) love, and—as part of his work on the committee judging contemporary literary excellence—runs into opposing views that get him (and us) thinking. (I’m still chewing on the position taken by the one other person of color in the group.) If all of this seems solemn, fear not. Hollywood (in all senses) basically saves the day. American Fiction builds to a truly hilarious conclusion, a moment that in one fell swoop lampoons all of the film’s satirical targets. And then sends us to the exits in a marvelous mood.
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