Thelonious “Monk” Ellison isn’t interested in reality, at least not the “reality” many of his writer peers use as the all-encompassing African American experience. For him, real life is dull. He teaches students who make too much of a fuss over the outdated nature of the literature he uses in his college classes. He’s a published writer, but nobody cares about his work. His family is a mess, but he’s long attempted to distance himself from it. To Monk, that is the reality he sees as underrepresented in the publishing industry.
Writer-director Cord Jefferson seems to think the same way, as far more of his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure” delves into Monk’s personal life relative to satirizing how the publishing industry treats Black artists. It helps the film distance itself from others with similar premises — like Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” — but “American Fiction” is also much safer. While not a bad thing in and of itself, it forces you to quickly reassess your expectations if you’re going in thinking you’re about to see a risky, fiery satire.
The family drama portion of the film is a low-key, emotional experience. Monk is hit with several personal crises in quick succession — he gets put on leave from his job after yelling at a student, his sister dies unexpectedly, his mother shows signs of Alzheimer’s — and he’s forced to reevaluate what’s important in his life. He writes the lazy, stereotypical parody novel “My Pafology” to vent his frustrations, but it isn’t greed or a desire for fame that has him continue with the charade once the book starts bringing in more commercial and critical acclaim, it’s feeling that he owes his family something.
Troubles in his home and work life start to spill into a blossoming personal relationship as Monk is not only pulled into several directions but feels the need to shield what he’s doing with his writing from Coraline. His ego, particularly the fact that Coraline seems to be the only one to have read and enjoyed any of his books, keeps him from being honest with the person he loves because he thinks she won’t respect him. As expected, this blows up in his face. Coraline never finds out what Monk is doing, but feeling like she’s cut out of his life is enough for her to end things. In the film’s final moments, we realize this story is still being written, and we are left with a bit of hope that Monk can overcome his personal struggles, even if he has given up on his artistic ambitions.
One gets the sense that Jefferson focuses so much on the family drama aspect of this story because the satire isn’t all that strong. The ideas in that half of the film are poignant and mildly funny, but they lack an edge, a bite, that great satire often has. We can tell that Monk is angry and fed up with publishers, audiences, and critics who dismiss his work in favor of writing he despises, but neither Jefferson’s script nor his direction share the same nastiness. You could attribute it to his status as a first-time filmmaker, but it’s just a matter of focus. Jefferson wanted to make a personal film rather than a bold, political statement, and he was much more effective at the former than the latter.
Cord Jefferson is a writer first and a director second. That’s where he’s plied his trade on various great television series over the last decade and via his background in journalism. But if he’s making the jump to feature filmmaking, he needs to find his footing. Film is a director’s medium, and Jefferson doesn’t yet have the visual style or technical inventiveness to get all the potential out of his terrific screenplays. He’s certainly one to watch going forward because he has big ideas, but I’d be curious to see how other filmmakers with more experience would handle his scripts. Even so, “American Fiction” is a fine debut feature, and I am excited to see what Jefferson does next.
