Satire is becoming increasingly more difficult to pull off successfully in 2023. Whether it be because the barrier of entry for people to create content results in lower quality content, or maybe it’s everyone’s complete lack of media literacy to where a good 50% of the audience of any satire will take it completely at face value without engaging with its message at all, or maybe it’s just because our world has gone almost completely beyond satirizing. Subtle satire is hard when our actual world is existing in such massive, completely unserious extremes. Like, what do you mean that the expelled congress member who lied about everything he ever said about himself, misused campaign funds for luxury makeup and gay porn, and still has managed to deny any wrongdoing even after landing an interview with Ziwe isn’t somehow the messiest queer person in Congress of just the month of December 2023, but rather the Senate staffer who filmed gay porn content for his OnlyFans account in an actual Senate hearing room? How do you satirize that when real life has become its own mutated form of a Paul Verhoeven film mixed with the radio commercials you’d hear in a Grand Theft Auto video game? And yet, once in a blue moon, we can find someone who actually manages to find life in the increasingly difficult genre that has the exact amount of tact and nuance in what they want to say to get it right. Enter Cord Jefferson and his debut film American Fiction.
Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s AMERICAN FICTION. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Claire Folger. © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a college professor and moderately successful author who has struggled to reach a deal for his new book to be published as publisher’s view it isn’t “Black” enough for publication. Frustrated by the success of other Black authors, such as Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), for writing stories enforcing negative stereotypes about Black people for white audiences, as well as the financial burden of taking care of his mother (Leslie Uggams) with Alzheimer’s following his sister’s (Tracee Ellis Ross) death, with zero help from his free-wheeling gay brother (Sterling K. Brown), Monk uses his anger to “sell out.” Penning a faux-autobiography of the life of a Black gangster living in poverty, Monk throws every negative stereotype about Black people at the wall in offensive detail and finds himself floored by the nearly instantaneous level of success his book, simply titled Fuck, receives in the majority-white literary circuit. Monk begins to struggle with his morals which tell him that letting a book such as this be celebrated does irreparable harm to his community, while also not wanting to part with the financial assistance the success of Fuck has offered now that he can comfortably take care of his mother in her final years.
L-R: Issa Rae as Sintara Golden and Nicole Kempskie as Sintara’s moderator in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s AMERICAN FICTION. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo Courtesy of ORION Pictures Inc. © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.
I can’t speak from personal perspective about much of anything in American Fiction (save one thing that I will touch upon later that doesn’t seem important, but is to me), but I know just enough about respectability politics and the double-edged sword of “visibility in media” to know that Jefferson has written a very biting take on what it means to succeed as a minority, but more specifically, a Black person, within the white-dominated industry that craves anything that can both confirm their biases and coddle them for having sympathy for said biases. What perhaps is the most remarkable part of Jefferson’s satirical writing style is that it works in very broad strokes; these are pretty obvious points to be making when you think critically about it for more than five seconds, but what makes it unique is that it works with one main broad stroke (the performance of “Blackness” for profit vs. selling yourself as-is) and delves very deep into every implication that taking the seemingly “immoral” route of it all holds. It’s easy to paint what Monk lets himself become as the less moral option, as remaining true to his own writing style and identity as a Black man in America is the clear moral choice for our hero to make upon his journey; to reject negative stereotypes and stand for what is right for his community. Yet, things are never as black-and-white (no pun intended) as they seem, and when the choice becomes digging into stereotypes, but giving your mother a luxurious senior living facility to spend the remainder of her days in as her increasingly worsening Alzheimer’s progresses, or simply letting her waste away at home alone, wandering the beaches at night, afraid of her own shadow, these choices become far more nuanced, and Monk’s choices become far more justified.
L-R: Tracee Ellis Ross as Lisa Ellison and Leslie Uggams as her mother Agnes in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s AMERICAN FICTION. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Claire Folger © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.
What I can speak to in American Fiction is the very real and borderline triggering depiction of Alzheimer’s Disease in the film. As someone who lives with, and takes care of a grandmother with progressing Dementia, I found myself pretty much always on Monk’s side when it came to making the decisions he needed to make to ensure her safety and comfort, and I can’t say that I, too, would make the same decisions, no matter how demoralizing they seem to me. These are little touches to the story that, to others, might be small things that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but absolutely shape the way I approach the film’s premise, and, more importantly, its protagonist.
L-R: Erika Alexander as Coraline and Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s AMERICAN FICTION. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Claire Folger. © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Now, don’t let my emotional tangent prevent you from thinking American Fiction isn’t a comedy, as it absolutely is. Even with its subject matter, there is a breezy air to American Fiction that keeps it from ever feeling too acerbic or bruising. In fact, it’s these breezier elements that don’t always work for the film as a whole. As the film progresses, I found the plot itself between the beats of comedy to sometimes fall into hyper-conventionality, hitting the beats that one would simply expect for a lighthearted comedy with mild-romance elements to it, which moderately goes against the very unique approach Jefferson holds for the satire beneath the plot. It’s not deal-breaking in the slightest, as the thing that makes American Fiction unique still very much succeeds at its core. I just sometimes wish everything could operate on the same level of tact.
L-R: Sterling K. Brown as Cliff Ellison, Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, and Erika Alexander as Coraline in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s AMERICAN FICTION. An Orion Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Claire Folger. © 2023 Orion Releasing LLC. All Rights Reserved.
American Fiction is a film that, thanks to an insightful screenplay and a wonderful performance at its center by Wright (No Time to Die; The French Dispatch), proves that satire is alive and well if approached correctly and in good faith. There’s no major indictment to be made when you get to hear the perspective of all involved, and the rationale for surviving the way they do in a system that devalues them no matter which archetype they fulfill as a Black person in a white room. It doesn’t always land with the interpersonal relationships it seeks to explore, resorting to the occasional cliché that the story itself likes to comment on, but with such intricate weavings of moral and intellectual quandaries that, frankly, don’t have a single answer in what is the “correct” course of action, makes American Fiction far more than just its comedy.
In select theaters December 15th, 2023.
Adding additional theaters December 22nd, 2023.
For more information, head to the official Amazon MGM Studios American Fiction webpage.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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