I can honestly say that I haven’t laughed as much at a movie for months – no, years! – as I did while watching Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut, American Fiction. Or maybe not “at”, but also not exactly “with” – in fact, as a white person employed within the entertainment-media matrix, the movie spends a significant amount of time laughing at me, and people just like me. But that’s OK, because in this unsparing take-down of the hand-wringing, self-absolving, reductive conversations that are taking place around notions of “representation” in our culture right now, Jefferson has got me, and people just like me, bang to rights.
Based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett (two decades old and, perturbingly, still entirely on the money), American Fiction follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, a university professor who, in the opening scene, finds himself under fire for writing the n-word on the board during class. It’s in the context of a Flannery O’Connor short story he's teaching, but one of his white students feels “triggered”, to use the parlance of the day; though Monk points out that he, an actual black man, has managed to get past it in this context, she nonetheless complains. “When did they all become so goddamn delicate?!” he rages to his faculty colleagues as they tell him he’ll be taking a compulsory break.
Monk’s angry at himself too, really, and at the world – frustrated that his literary career hasn’t taken off as he’d have liked, and that his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), has been unable to sell his latest hifalutin book, a reworking of Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians. Meanwhile he seethes with indignity as he observes the success being enjoyed by another college-educated, middle-class black writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose latest novel, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a melodrama written in the vernacular of “the streets”, has made her the darling of the publishing industry. “They want a black book,” says Arthur, sheepishly.
Much like Aeschylus’s Xerxes, who returns, licking his war wounds, to his widowed mother in Susa, Monk finds himself pulled back to his family’s beach house outside Boston, and to his own bereaved matriarch, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), about whose mental state his sister, Lisa, a doctor (Tracee Ellis Ross), is becoming increasingly concerned. Monk is preoccupied though, and one night, in a fit of pique, he starts to write a “black book”: a fake memoir called My Pafology, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, that he hopes will satirise the cardboard-flat drug dealers and absent fathers for which the publishing execs have such an appetite.
Sooner than expected, Monk finds himself more on the hook for his mother’s care than he might have imagined – his errant brother, Cliff (Sterling K Brown), a plastic surgeon, is cash-strapped by his recent divorce and distracted by life as a newly-out gay man – and while The Persians reworking might not cover the costs, sure enough Monk’s other book, which he insisted Arthur send out to publishers as a form of protest, has attracted the offer of a sizeable, life-changing advance. Monk has to decide whether his mother’s wellbeing is a worthy cause for which to sacrifice his bigger point, and his already-battered ego.
In the lead role, Jeffrey Wright gives a performance that is truly one of the most enjoyable you’ll see this year (and yes, I know it’s not even February). He plays Monk, as he should, absolutely straight – which is exactly why his impotent pomposity and ground-down angst are so very funny. The scenes in which he is required to embody his own creation, Stagg, to impress his publishers and woo a Hollywood executive (Adam Brody) are nothing short of genius; Wright’s flickering eyes and pained growl as Monk gets deeper and deeper into the pickle he has created are frankly divine.
Part of the appeal – and the point – of Jefferson’s film, which he also wrote and produced, is that the characters are beautifully three-dimensional and the dialogue finely honed, giving underused actors as fine as Wright so much to work with. Even Monk’s love interest Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer who lives across the street from his mother, somehow exceeds the rom-com conventions of her role. (There is a slightly twee romance between the family house-keeper and the local policeman, but it’s low-stakes enough that we’ll let it slide.) As a result the film has an emotional richness beyond its satirical agenda (although the various executives with whom Monk – as Stagg – liaises, are written with the venality they deserve).
Astonishingly, this is Jefferson’s debut as a feature film director, although he’s been lauded for his television writing for the likes of The Good Place and Watchmen and was a consultant on Succession (before that he was, for his sins, a journalist). Though Jefferson’s in his early 40s, the film sits perfectly in the Disgruntled Middle Aged Man comedy canon that has been ruled over of late by Alexander Payne, and is indeed a refreshing addition given that Payne’s latest, The Holdovers, is somewhat underwhelming. In an awards season likely dominated by films with enormous budgets and flashy production values, sometimes at the expense of decent scripts, American Fiction is a quieter, cleverer, funnier film, and, on its own terms, dazzlingly accomplished.
'American Fiction' is out in cinemas on 2 February
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
