Female Film Critics 24/375
Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasures, Cord Jefferson’s cagey American Fiction has garnered five Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score. The story introduces Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a serious West Coast university professor/fledgling writer who bristles at the media’s exploitation of Black stereotypes for profit.
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One of the year’s very best films, writer/director Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a sly, sophisticated and thoroughly engaging put down of America’s propensity for racial stereotyping — in particular in the realm of literature, publishing and academia, but crossing into other turf, as well. It is the subtly told tale of a highly esteemed and brilliant Black author and college professor. Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, whose current manuscript isn’t selling because it isn’t deemed to be ‘Black’ enough. So, as an anger-based joke, Monk — as he’s known to family, friends and fans — composes a supposedly semi-autobiographical novel that he credits to a completely fictitious author who is reportedly hiding his real identity because he’s ostensibly a criminal on the run. The manuscript is pure in-your-face jive, but — against his will — his agent submits it to a publishing house where they applaud it’s authenticity and buy it for big bucks.
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Hearing Black artists’ work described as “raw” and “real” grates on Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. It’s not that Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a professor and author, doesn’t find some writing transportive. He just considers a lot of what catapults onto best-seller lists and movie screens featuring Black characters pandering: stories of drugs, deadbeat dads, pregnant teens, and police shootings. Those circumstances might be some people’s realities, but writer/director Cord Jefferson’s debut feature film argues there are other stories we’re not seeing. A blistering indictment of giving the public what it thinks it wants, it criticizes the publishing industry—and some films—for “elevating” Black voices yet perpetuating stereotypes.
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