Released: 9th January
Seen: 27th February
We live in an age where we keep hearing the same refrain over and over again, “No one can take a joke anymore, you can’t joke about anything”. It’s a refrain screamed largely by people who’ve been telling the exact same joke since 1993 and can’t be bothered to update their material. The truth is that you can still make jokes about pretty much anything as long as you do it well, you can push the boundaries of good taste if you’re able to actually do something interesting. Comedy is still fairly easy to do and can be quite shocking while doing it, you just need to not only tell the jokes well but know what you want to target with your comedy. American Fiction knows exactly what it wants to target with its comedy, and oh boy does it land every single punch that it throws.
American Fiction revolves around Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a writer and professor who is known largely for making his students feel uncomfortable during their classes by actually presenting the black experience as bluntly as possible and also for writing books that keep being rejected from publishers for “not being black enough”. Of course, Monk knows what that phrase means, ‘not black enough’ means ‘not stereotypically black enough according to the white people in charge of the industry’ and quite rightfully that pisses Monk off. So, fuelled by a cascade of family stressors and a need to make money, Monk writes a book titled My Pafology under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. The book is a pointed mockery of the exact kind of book that Monk’s publishers keep insisting they want, it’s an over-the-top imaginary story of a convict that’s full of drugs, murders and gang violence that was deliberately intense to make fun of the kind of stories presented as ‘black stories’… unfortunately no one seems to get that they’re being made fun of and Monk’s book soon becomes a monster hit, one that ends up creating havoc in Monk’s already hectic life.
American Fiction is the kind of brutal satire that comes out swinging from the very first scene and it doesn’t stop throwing body blows until the second the credits roll. It’s a film powered by the idea of calling out the very industry it’s a part of and how that industry only seems to want certain kinds of stories told from minorities. It often feels like it’s a minor miracle when there’s a film with a mostly black cast that doesn’t involve some form of major trauma because that’s the stuff that sadly sells and this film calls out how a part of that is just that the reason this stuff sells is because it’s the only thing being advertised. It’s not subtle about what it’s calling out, Jeffrey Wright feels like he’s always about 3 seconds away from turning to the camera and going “Do you fucking get it now?” because it’s that gloriously blunt about what it’s trying to point out.
Most of why these jabs land is that the cast is nothing short of brilliant, Jeffrey Wright in particular manages to make his disdain at everyone loving My Pafology absolutely palpable. You can see him wanting to explode every time someone praises the book, like he wants to scream “You get I’m making fun of you, right?” all the damn time and he never lets it go, he never lets the tension fall which just makes everything funnier. Sterling Brown is also a delight in his role as Monk’s newly-out gay brother Cliff who is still trying to work out exactly what being a gay man means and it’s a delightfully funny performance, one that also manages to have a measure of real emotion as it hits him that there are people who never got to know the real Cliff. The two of them are genuinely great and it’s not a shock that they’re Oscar nominated. In any other year they would undoubtedly have a shot but… well, when the time comes to Oscar predictions, let’s say their categories were locked up a while ago.
While the entire cast is spectacular, it does stun me that Issa Rae’s appearance as Sintara Golden, the writer of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, isn’t getting awards love. She is basically one of the major catalysts for this film and every scene she’s in is hers to take, the scene of her giving a dramatic reading from We’s Lives In Da Ghetto is one of the funniest scenes of the last year just purely because of her delivery. It’s wild that she’s not being put in the same awards conversations as Jeffrey and Sterling because she deserves to be there.
The real superstar here is writer/director Cord Jefferson whose razor-sharp script and perfect direction would be wildly impressive if this were the man’s 20th film… it’s his first. While Cord’s been a TV writer for years and worked on shows like The Good Place and Watchmen, this is his feature film debut as writer and director and he’s just better at this than 95% of people who work in this genre. It’s honestly amazing to get to see the first film of someone clearly destined to be an icon but if he decides to make more films, we’re all going to be better off because American Fiction is the kind of film that tells you that you’re witnessing the start of a truly great career.
Indeed while watching American Fiction it’s hard not to mentally compare this film to The Producers and hope that means we’re about to see Cord Jefferson have a career comparable to Mel Brooks. Here is a film about a man who tries to create a piece of art that will offend people and ends up accidentally making a hit. The key difference is that The Producers did this kind of trick for money, American Fiction is about someone writing something offensive in order to make a point and it does so in a way that’s wickedly funny and endlessly compelling. I can’t think of a higher compliment than to say this made me think of one of the greatest comedies of all time so if you’re curious if you’ll like this, just think about if you liked The Producers because if you did then this will scratch a similar itch.
American Fiction is the kind of gut punch that has been sorely needed, a film that takes a swing at the industry and calls it out as loudly as it can. Its perfect blend of comedy and drama is fantastically performed by a brilliant cast who have been blessed with one of the best scripts you could hope for. It’s that rare film that lives up to its reputation and even excels at it. It’s hard to understate how great this film is, it’s the kind of thing you just have to see for yourself (provided of course you can handle it when a film calls out its own audience).
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