Everyman
American Fiction is a very clever and funny film.
Actually, it's three clever and funny films. One of them is a farce, the sort of farce you can almost see Frasier Crane getting involved in. Thelonius Ellison (Jeffery Wright) is successful, middle-class and rather curmudgeonly. He's a published novelist and a lecturer. And he also happens to be black. His novels are historical fiction based on Greek tragedies; but his agent tells him that he would sell better if they were "more black". So he writes a deliberately unpublishable, borderline racist novel, full of hip-hop, drugs, guns, ghetto cliches and daddy-issues. As night follows day, the book becomes a bestseller and a huge critical success. The consequences of the deception reach Woodhousian levels of convolution. Of course Ellison ends up on the committee to judge a prestigious literary away. Of course his book is place on the short list. Of course the other judge love it. Of course he can't bring himself to admit that he is the author.
But it's also a pretty sharp satire about the publishing industry, and about attitudes to race more generally. The book that Ellison's publisher wants him to emulate, We's Lives in Da Ghetto, is written by Sinartra Golden (Isa Rae) a woman of colour who talks received pronunciation but writes in an exaggeratedly "street" patois. It is white liberal who lap this kind of thing up; a kind of political misery lit; which allows them to feel that they are allies while in fact perpetuating stereotypes. The three white people on the awards panel think that Ellison's pseudonymous book (now entitled simply Fuck) should win the award: the two black judges -- Ellison and Golden herself -- both think that the book is pandering to prejudice and should not win. They are of course outvoted "because it is essential that black voices should be heard".
Meanwhile, taking up probably the majority of the screen time, Ellison reestablishes contact with his family: his brother who just come out as gay; his mother who is rapidly declining with dementia; his sister who dies suddenly and unexpectedly. The unstated joke is that while he is publishing an absurd story about gangsta-rap and guns, he is observing the stranger-than-fiction lives of his own, rather posh, black family. One of the judges on the award panel says that the last thing he wants to read is any more Knausgaard auto-fiction crap. It is clear that that is precisely what Ellison ought to be writing.
The final minutes of the film lurch slightly into meta-fiction; rather reminding me of The Player. We've certainly been watching a movie which teeters between comedy drama and farce; but the characters were sufficiently real and well presented that I wanted to know how it all came out: did Ellison ever come clean about the deception; what really happened at the award ceremony where he was both judge and winner. Instead, we found out how he represented the resolution in fiction after the event.
But nevertheless, a clever, funny, unexpectedly literate movie, that comes at questions of race and class from a pretty oblique angle.
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