Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’: The Movie Everyone’s Going to Be Fighting About
A blistering satire about American attitudes toward race and success as filtered through one Black writer’s experiences in the publishing industry, American Fiction was the breakout film of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and it seems sure to inspire heated debate upon its Dec. 15 release.
Director Cord Jefferson’s feature debut adapts Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure with wit and panache, charting the mess created by author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) when, in response to his frustration over seeing only stereotypical inner-city Black stories receive acclaim, he pens his own pandering novel of broken homes and crime dubbed My Pafology and it becomes a literary sensation. Simultaneously disgusted and enticed by this turn of events, Monk attempts to perpetuate his prank, all as he copes with a family life coming apart at the seams thanks to a recent tragedy and his strained feelings about his late father, his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, his brother (Sterling K. Brown), and his new love interest (Erika Alexander).
The personal, professional, and cultural all absurdly collide in American Fiction, which proves an equal-opportunity lampoon, poking fun at white liberal allyship, Black intellectual arrogance and anger, and the corrosive cycle of exploitation and self-exploitation that limits, rather than expands, ideas about who we are and what we’re capable of achieving. Refusing to posit sermonic answers to its questions about artistic expression and representation, it’s as complicated as its protagonist, embodied by a masterful Wright as an erudite writer whose egotistical indignation is at once justified and tangled up with his chaotic personal travails.