Last Friday was the most crowded I’ve seen The Charles since 2019—for something new, not a revival like Die Hard or Possession, one that’ll sell as many seats as American Fiction. It must’ve gotten a great review in the Times or The New Yorker, because the place was packed full of gray-haired liberals from the suburbs ready to be roasted. American Fiction is aimed at a white audience, one which is looking for something less blunt than White Fragility; they want to know that, no matter what anyone says, they’re going to be okay because they listened. They’ll be up to date on NPR’s latest lesson plan, sated now that they’ve done their duty and paid for a ticket to see the latest emerging “black voice.” And, undoubtedly, they were drawn in by a good trailer.
But the trailer is all that American Fiction has to offer. I don’t mind when movies diverge from their advertising—that usually leads to some interesting surprises—but what’s elided in the promotion for American Fiction is a family drama that takes up at least half the movie. Jeffrey Wright plays a college professor (Thelonious “Monk” Ellison) who gets fired for teaching a Flannery O’Connor essay and writing the n-word on the board. He starts arguing with the students, and the administration has an excuse to can him. His novels aren’t selling, and they’re relegated to “African American Studies” in chain bookstores despite simply being American fiction by an African American author. “The blackest thing about this book is the ink,” he tells a lanky clerk with “sympathy” but no real desire to help Wright re-categorize his books. “I’m just going to put them back when you leave!”
That line about black ink is in the trailer, along with the bulk of Issa Rae’s performance—she plays Sintara Golden, a successful author with a bestseller called We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. It’s an hyperbolized version of the “authentically black story,” the only one that corporate publishers want to sell: something that panders to and satisfies Times readers and NPR listeners, and, specifically, older white women. Bleeding hearts can rest easy knowing they’ve listened to “black voices.” Maybe they still have those yard signs from 2020. The satire in American Fiction might’ve been refreshing four years ago, but it’s too little too late now.
What’s so pernicious about the books, films, and television shows that We’s Lives in the Ghetto parodies are their implicit goal: to make white people feel better about still living at the top, and to keep black people and black artists in their place—the “Black Voices” sections on streaming services are no different than those bullshit “African American Studies,” and it’s a hair away from separate bathrooms and water fountains. That’s the most incisive point American Fiction has to make, but unfortunately, this film is an example of exactly the kind of product that absolves white people and further marginalizes art by black people as “black art.”
Cord Jefferson’s script and direction are terrible. He has no idea how to block a scene (three abreast at a beachside memorial?) and often leaves his actors hanging—Wright’s a great actor, but there are some rough takes in here that break basic film grammar. Besides that, the bulk of American Fiction is a cookie cutter family drama with zero intersection with the sociopolitical world satire. Jefferson, liberally adapting Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, adds material that sinks the movie. That crowd on Friday was packed, and it reassured them all right, but they didn’t leave liking it. “It was so much heavier than I expected! And real!” “Issa Rae was hardly in it at all…” “Why did the sister die so suddenly…?”
It’s the kind of wonky writing and directing you see in high schools, colleges, film festivals. Everett’s book is worth checking out since those are the only sections that come alive at all. But it’s a limp film, just as regressive and backward as White Fragility and all of the other pieces of white guilt “black trauma porn” that the movie tries to make fun of. American Fiction doesn’t know it’s part of the problem.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith
