American Fiction

American Fiction introduces an upper middle class Black family of doctors—one a doctor of literature—coming together to decide what to do about Mom when she can no longer take care of herself. 

They are a literature PhD, his departed ob-gyn father’s favorite teased by his siblings as “Doctor Dictionary,” on an enforced leave of absence from his West Coast faculty for offending undergraduates’ tender identological sensibilities; his sister who stayed closest to home in Boston, a divorced ob-gyn in a family planning clinic; and their brother, a divorced plastic surgeon in Tucson who lost his wife, half his practice, and his kids’ respect after his wife caught him in bed with a man.

Thelonious “Monk” (Jeffrey Wright), Agnes (Leslie Uggams), and Lisa Ellison (Tracee Ellis Rose) in Cord Jefferson's American Fiction

The Ellisons are Thelonious “Monk” (Jeffrey Wright), Lisa (Tracee Ellis Rose), Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), and mater familias Agnes (Leslie Uggams), with lifelong family retainer Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) and her willin’ Barkis, Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas). This cast clicks, and makes a pretty party of it.

On the surface, writer and director Cord Jefferson gets the most laffs playing stereotypes, breaking Black Lives Matter’s new bottles with the old wine of Tom Wolfe’s “radical chic”. It may well be that there is no more fraught person in the United States than an American who resembles by race people first brought by force to work enslaved to British colonists. The anger at the core of this story, passed from father to son though not only, is rooted in the frustration of feeling forced lifelong to fulfill the impossible range of so many of each others’ and other Americans’ expectations. For this we expect that Jefferson’s film adaptation of Percival Everett’s original “Erasure” (2001) should be a shoo-in favorite for best adapted screenplay.

Monk is bummed because as a scholar of comparative literature with a successful if modest academic publishing record—“I read your book!” “Oh, so you’re the one.”—he is not allowed to be a dead white guy. Not that Monk has the least desire to be dead or white: He aches for discerning readers to accept his close readings and analyses of subjects such as an Aristophanes play on their merit, not the author’s jacket photo. In a chain bookstore Monk angrily moves copies of his books from the “African-American” section to general literature as a timid young white employee looks on blinking his eyes. Monk is the more bummed when he eyes in the general literature section a publisher’s display stacked with copies of “We’s Lives in da Ghetto” the blockbuster bestseller by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) which he has made a point NOT to read, especially after hearing Golden read and discuss it at a book festival.

Looking after his mother, Monk meets Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lovely neighbor across the street from his parents’ summer home. (The book is set in Washington, D.C., and on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.) But Monk strains under the pressure of his anger as his father before him; circumstances further pressure him to take full responsibility for committing his mother to one of the gilt facilities in which Americans install their elderly, to the tune of $5600 per month. His tension and anger play out in an intellectual game, a process best left to the medium of film: It is a treat to watch Wright carry the picture as he banters with the material. This and Everett’s original coolly complement each other.

The final shot pans skyward from a Hollywood studio lot to strains of Cannonball Adderley’s warm classic version of “Autumn Leaves” with Miles Davis; odd though not to hear a single note of Monk’s legendary namesake.

American Fiction 2023 U.S. (157 minutes) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Orion Pictures/T-Street. Directed and adapted by Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure”; cinematography by Cristina Dunlap; editing by Hilda Rasula; production design by Jonathan Guggenheim; casting by Jennifer Euston; music by Laura Karpman; produced by Jefferson, Jermaine Johnson, Nikos Karmigios, and Ben LeClair.