American Fiction (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

I thought we were in for a treat when our hero is told not to be rude to anyone important. Kick ass, here we go. Nope. Worthy but dull. One part cosmic joke, three parts soap opera, only relieved by the kind of subdued acting that’s become very much the contemporary Oscar-nominated trend (see The Holdovers, Oppenheimer). And with a narrative thrust that is, unfortunately, laughable. I grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, which for generations lived under the cloud of No Mean City, a portrayal of the city as gangster heaven, and we are nothing on what Hollywood did to the Native Americans so, spare me, anyone saying they have been unfairly treated by any part of the media.

Let’s get the soap out of the way first. Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is an out-of-fashion literary novelist eking out a living as a English professor whose students are on the verge of cancelling him. He hives off to the family home where he discovers – discovers! – his mother (Leslie Uggams) is suffering from Alzheimer’s, brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) is gay and a coke addict and his sister Lisa (Tracey Ellis Ross) is so ill from heart disease she drops down dead in front of him.

When his latest novel is rejected he decides he will rip off current bestseller Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) and write a book in gangsta patois. Lo and behold it works and what began as him cocking a snook takes on a more serious dimension when he is offered a $750,000 advance. And guess what, suddenly his principles go hang, and not because he’s just a greedy skunk like everyone else but because he’s been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card in that how, otherwise, with a divorced coke addict brother more interested in his latest lover and a dead sister – both I hasten to add high up in the medical profession, sister a consultant, brother a plastic surgeon – is he going to pay for his mother’s care. So he goes along with the gig and the problems multiply as he lives the hypocrisy he claims to abhor.

The idea of someone duping the publishing industry is hardly new. Bestselling British literary author William Boyd sent in a novel under a pseudonym but written in his own style that had attracted a gazillion sales and that was rejected. Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski sent in one of his own award-winning novels without a word changed and had that rejected. So the publishing industry, like Hollywood and like the media, is just too easy a target unless the weapon is a lot sharper than this.

And hopefully this is a short-lived trope (Argylle went down a similar route), but we see his characters come alive in front of him and play out terrible scenes from his joke fiction.

Yep, so someone is making a point, that Black Literature has lost its way and why can’t Black authors be heralded for writing about ancient Greece (obviously not in your typical blood-sex-and-thunder fashion) or other arcane subjects or even, as shown here, take as their subject matter well-off university-educated rather than poverty-stricken characters and explore their issues (the same as everyone else’s since you’re asking).

Outside of Monk who spends most of the time locked in his head with a bit of light relief with fan-turned-lover Coraline (Erika Alexander), the only person who doesn’t take this stuff seriously is the sister who died too soon, deflating our literary hero by telling him his books come in handy for steadying loose table legs. Debut offering by writer-director Cord Jefferson based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett.

Kept afloat, just, by Jeffrey Wright (No Time to Die, 2021) mainlining on repression but that’s about it.