It’s difficult to know where to begin in talking about a film like American Fiction, because at the heart of this film is difficult thing to talk about… at least for white people, and… I am a white guy.
While the details might be different, America is as caught up today with race issues as it ever has been. The mandate for political correctitude is diversity, where black is the new black, and a large portion of white America is walking on eggshells in trying to figure out how to participate in the conversation without canceling themselves. Which ironically is the dilemma Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffery Wright) finds himself in. Ironic, because Monk is a black man, being unofficially censured by white people for not being black enough.
Monk isn’t exactly on the same page as the rest of society. He not only can’t be bothered with that kind of political correctness, he is bothered by what he considers to be clichéd black tropes and the people who promote and eat them up. Those stories aren’t his, and the assumption that
Monk’s own story sounds a bit like a spin off from the Cosby Show. He grew up anything but poor, and is originally from an affluent suburb of Boston where he grew up living in a beautiful Queen Anne house complete with a live-in housekeeper. At least when he and his family weren’t at the beach house in Cape Cod.
His father was a doctor. His siblings became doctors, and he is a published author and university professor living in Los Angeles. His story is anything but the typical black American tragedy of violence and oppression.
Which Cord Jefferson’s debut film based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett is definitely not. It’s a comedy. A satire that brilliantly addresses a challenging topic by caricaturing it. American fiction is funny, irreverent, enlightening, and honest in its merciless lampooning of the hypocrisy of the PC mores driving American race relations.
There appears to be more than a few similarities between the character of Monk and the original author Percival Everett, who like Monk is an author and university professor living in Los Angeles, and whose writing draws heavily from Greek myth.
