PicoBlog

Ninety minutes into “American Fiction,” I asked myself what in the world this movie was.

With no solid answer at that point, I was going to tell you that this is the rare, decent film that shifts its intentions too much for its own good. You could even carve three different movies out of it. Give me 25 minutes to cut from it, and I could either make a biting race satire, a middle-aged schlub satire, or an aging-male melodrama. None of these co-exist all that well here.

Then the last ten minutes happened.

It’s not that much of a shocker, yet it’s enough to shift a viewer’s understanding of the film, forcing an unexpected framework on it.

That framework contains the three kinds of films, each fighting for contention of “American Fiction’s” heart. This framework makes sense of why they are so poorly mixed. It also justifies, to some extent, the acclaim given to this movie, such as a 2024 Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.

What we get in that first ninety minutes seems too scattered and incongruent. The great actor Jeffrey Wright plays a college English professor who writes fiction, one Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. He’s the kind of schlubby character that Alexander Payne loves, one who doesn’t understand his easily offended students and whose name is routinely misspelled by people who should know better.

The movie plays early as a satire of college life, but then it veers into several syrupier scenes of Monk’s family life. He’s friends with his sister, then she dies suddenly and unexpectedly. His mother gets Alzheimer’s. His brother comes out as gay, suddenly and unexpectedly.

Life’s changing too fast for this middle-aged single guy, so in typical romcomdrama fashion, he finds a female. She happens to love books. She’s read his works of fiction. They of course must date.

That’s another type of movie within “American Fiction,” and yet from there it veers a third kind of film, a strong satire of the contemporary book publishing industry. At that point I was asking myself whether “Fiction” is about being a professor at university, being a middle-aged single man, or being a creative type within a money-grubbing industry full of stupidity. The movie seemed to have no obvious aim.

Ever the literati, Monk gets frustrated by a famous black female author’s supposed pandering. His books, wrongly classified as African-American Studies material according to him, aren’t acknowledged by anybody but his new girlfriend.

But the famous female writer, Sintara Golden, has a beloved new bestseller titled We’s Lives Da Ghetto. She draws big crowds to her interviews. Meanwhile, Monk, on a panel of three at one of those creative-writing conferences, can only get an audience of eight people. Everybody, especially white audiences, love Ms. Golden’s book. Monk thinks this its schlock. He will be put on a judging panel of a literary award with, oops, Ms. Golden.

Monk can’t get his own draft of fiction published, so he decides to pin a racebaiting book, taking on a stupid pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. He assumes this persona on phone calls, pretending to be a convict who writes authentically about the black male experience.

Despite his fraud, his book — titled, plainly, Fuck — becomes a bestseller.

For the rest of the movie, “American Fiction” jostles between scenes of family/romcom melodrama and pretty wicked satire.

On the latter count, it takes great aim at the wants of art markets, specifically of popular books and films. In both cases, upper-tier whites want Black writing, but not just any Black writing, and not Monk’s at all. They go in for obvious racially coded matter such as We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.

Monk says at one point that he “doesn’t believe in race,” and yet his fake novel Fuck is written for the only audience that buys books in bulk: white people who, as a character says, “think they want the truth, but they don’t; they want to feel absolved.” He goes on a TV talkshow in silhouette pretending to be Stagg R. Leigh, mouthing fake “jive” to serious acclaim. This persona is nearly the polar opposite of his posh, moody, professorial self.

Pulling all of the moods and tones in “Fiction” together is Wright, a strong actor whose performance grounds the whole movie. He’s a apt guide through it all; Mr. Wright ought to star in more films. Most of the movie’s humor — and this one is often laugh-out-loud funny — stems from his character’s schlubbery in contrast with the foolishness his perceives in the world.

Spoilers now here.

What the ending tells us, Lord help me if I’m wrong, is that nothing in the movie before Monk’s discussion with a Hollywood director is real.

The entire movie *could be* Monk’s screenplay of his own life, or his articulation of the story to that director. What “American Fiction” itself becomes, possibly in this view, is the filmed screenplay of Monk’s story, Hollywoodized.

That accounts for its inconsistencies perhaps. Giving most viewers what they want, appealing to everybody at times, “American Fiction” seems to poorly mix melodrama and satire. Admittedly, these two modes are almost impossible to put together; only those who have pulled it off are great directors: Hal Ashby, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, Woody Allen.

Yet if nothing in this movie is truly Monk’s story, the incongruence I sensed works at a meta-level, pointing to viewers’ expectations of what this movie should be. Of course, a 2024 movie about a black American male should either say orthodox things about race, or it could dare to satirically slash and burn them. “American Fiction” does neither exactly. Why?

Because then it must be about how portraying a modern black American male on film presents so many difficulties, with audience expectations, that it can’t meet them. So pieces of “Fiction” meet different audience demands. And you can’t tell how much of Monk’s story has been given the Hollywood treatment. Maybe some or most of it? Who knows?

With Monk, he doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. He’d also rather not be a panderer. Persona-wise, in public life today, neither is possible — so says my viewing of “Fiction” — so long as a person wants success based on merit, on their own terms.

I imagine that it’s pretty close to impossible to write books today, spending all that time hoping for readers to appreciate you for your unique vision. You write for money, you sell a part of yourself. Monk resists all that until he doesn’t. In doing so, he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. That would be an American fiction!

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