Jeffrey Wright is having quite the year. It’s been a brilliant film crescendo as he featured in Asteroid City and Rustin, and just before the end of the year, he peaks with American Fiction. Directed by Cord Jefferson, the film follows a writer named Monk (Jeffrey Wright) who takes exception to how the establishment decides which black stories get amplified.
Monk is a writer and a teacher and pragmatically goes about both. Viewing the world through a lens that doesn’t see color, he grows frustrated as his books continue to get grouped with Black works. His perspective on the matter was just because he’s a Black author, doesn’t mean he’s telling a black story. To that end, if a Black author pens a fictional piece involving Greek Mythology, it shouldn’t be grouped with “Black Stories”.
The film stars Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, Tracee Ellis Ross, Adam Brody, Keith David, John Ortiz, Leslie Uggams, and Issa Rae. It’s a cast that’s loaded with Black greatness and honors Erika Alexander in her rightful place as an attorney (she will forever be Maxine Shaw, attorney at law from Living Single). A casting job well done by Jennifer Euston.
Jefferson made a statement that I’d like to share:
“Erasure was published more than 20 years ago, yet the questions it asks remain painfully relevant: Why is American culture fascinated with Black trauma? Why aren’t Black professors depicted in books and films as frequently as Black drug addicts, or Black rappers, or Black slaves? Why is it that white people with the power to greenlight films, books, and TV shows have such a limited view of what Black lives should look like? I’ve asked myself these questions many times before when I hear yet another slave movie is going into production, or when I see that another talented Black actor has been hired to portray a drug dealer, pimp or single mother who needs to overcome her unenviable lot in life. This reductive view of Blackness makes me angry. And I’ve funneled that anger into “American Fiction.”
You can see the aforementioned anger written into the film and executed with flair and intelligence. You can use those same questions and apply them to any part of this industry. Why are there so many Black actors and so few Black directors? Why are there so many Black stories being told and so few Black critics? So here, Monk is fed up with the same story of Black struggle being pushed and heavily marketed when other experiences could be shared, even beyond his own. He spends the film fighting an uphill battle while also dealing with the declining health of his mother.
His family affairs are an entirely separate area that needs attention. He struggles to be the odd child out as both of his siblings became doctors (one medical, the other chiropractic) and didn’t come around his family much after their father passed away. He gives off all the signs of an introvert who finds difficulty expressing himself, a message that his brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) conveyed so eloquently as he read him for filth a handful of times in the film.
The meat of the film follows Monk as he calls himself getting back at the industry by making a story so stereotypically traumatic that no publisher would be able to resist. The problem comes when he does just that, hauling in offers left and right for publishing, marketing, and even talks of film adaptations. He’s personally torn in two as he has to decide if this shockingly easy money is worth it to effectively sell his soul for a pot of gold.
American Fiction gets a 9 out of 10. It’s rated R for the language, sexual references, and some drug usage. Outside of that, it’s brilliantly done and Jeffrey Wright puts on the performance of the year (I would recommend this film for Black teens especially). It’s a beautiful story of the human experience told through a Black lens but thankfully reaching a mainstream audience; the exact same thing Monk was trying to do with his books.
American Fiction will be available in theaters everywhere on December 22nd.
-Jon Jones
Photo:
[…] two years ago, American Fiction put this subject matter into focus after Jeffrey Wright’s character was compartmentalized […]