Susan Granger’s review of “American Fiction” (Orion Pictures/Amazon M.G.M.)
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.
After suffering rejection-after-rejection of his new manuscript, a translation of Aeschylus’s The Persians, because it’s deemed inadequately Black literature, misanthropic Monk bitterly cobbles together a book of offensive Black cliches about gangsters and urban suffering and submits it as a joke under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh with the title My Pafology.
After all, if rival novelist, Oberlin-educated former publishing assistant Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) can be acclaimed for her pandering We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, why can’t he?
Indulging in one highly effective scene involving magical realism, Jefferson breaks all audience expectations about what the plot involves and where it’s going.
So instead of another rebuff, Monk, who presents himself as an ex-con, is deluged with whopping publishing offers and catapulted to literary fame, much to the amazement of his agent (John Ortiz) and his successful, upper middle-class physician, elder siblings (Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K. Brown).
This financial windfall comes just as the Ellison family is facing a financial crisis as their matriarch, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who still lives in their childhood home in Boston, is suffering signs of memory loss/dementia/Alzheimer’s.
Written by Jefferson in his directorial debut, “American Fiction” won the prestigious People’s Choice Award at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
In his acceptance, Jefferson spoke about how films about Black people always seem to focus on tragedy: slavery, civil rights, drug dealers – “Black trauma porn” – excluding the rest of the Black experience. Which is why he created this crowd-pleasing, satirical dramedy that skewers racial politics and representation.
Yet historically, comedies are not good Best Picture bets. Back in 1997, “The Full Monty” lost to “Titanic,” while “Little Miss Sunshine” lost to “The Departed” in 2006.
FYI: There’s no Thelonious Monk music on the soundtrack, just Laura Karpman’s Oscar-nominated score with a variety of tracks, including Cannonball Adderly.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “American Fiction” is an edgy 8, playing in theaters.
