“American Fiction,” February 10, 2024, Lexington Venue theater. I went into this knowing what I’d heard in a couple of reviews. I came out of it working hard to piece this excellent film written and directed by Cord Jefferson together. Not that I couldn’t understand what was going on. Rather, I was working to get at intent and meaning. I kept wondering if I was overthinking, misinterpreting what was happening and why. It’s an incredibly smart, funny, and wonderful film that takes no prisoners, poking fun of almost everyone it represents. It is merciless in its look at higher education (that goodness it went after an English department, I couldn’t have handled another assault on history), publishing, media generally, race relations, gender, sex, and of course, Boston. It goes after the pretenses of portions of the Black middle class as well as white desperation and cluelessness.
The acting is all superb and the characters wonderfully drawn. Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (the wonderful Jeffrey Wright) is a California-based African-American writer/professor who does not write for the airport market, and does not write ‘Black’ books for the white or Black market that reflect lucrative Blacksploitation caricatures and stereotypes. His ‘principled’ rigidities are not serving him well in the classroom, in the department or university, or in the publishing game. But there are obligations beyond work: a ‘difficult’ family (amazing work from his aging mother (Leslie Uggams), his MD sister and brother (Tracee Elis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Life is complicated and expensive. How does a writer such as he deal with this? What are the compromises that might/must be made, what is the blowback, and how does one make deals with the devil without becoming the thing you’ve always viewed with contempt. Can you? It ain’t easy.
His name is Monk and this has the feel of free-form jazz lived by a remarkably articulate and literate set of life musicians. Yes, there’s some simplifying and stereotyping, but it’s worth it for the ride.
Really. See this one.