Screens/Reviews

American Fiction
Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 117 mins.
When: Now
Genre: Dramady
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: A comic look at well-intentioned white wokeness as a struggling author, told his new work isn’t “Black enough,” pens a cliche-riddled “urban” novel as a prank only to see it become a bestseller. One of the year’s best films.

AMERICAN FICTION, in theatres this week, was the deserving — and ironic — winner of TIFF’s 2023 People’s Choice Award.

It was deserving because first-time director and co-writer Cord Jefferson (best known as a writer on shows like Watchmen and The Good Place, among others) has created a smart, funny film that brilliantly satirizes the kind of well-intentioned white wokeness that still manages to reduce people of colour to stereotypes and tokens.

It was ironic because the very people the film mocks are probably the ones who voted for it.

Small-time writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) can’t get his latest book published because white publishers don’t think it’s “Black enough.” Frustrated, he creates a cliche-riddled “urban novel” dripping with stereotypes, which he titles Fuck as a “fuck you” to those publishers. He forces his agent to send it out under an alias as a prank and, to Monk’s horror, publishers are hungry to publish his “joke.”

Complications grow as Monk is invited to join a literary prize jury to help its diversity — and white committee members push to give the award to his pen-name-authored book.

A compelling family drama unfolds in a decent subplot as Monk and his siblings, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), negotiate care for their ailing mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Clifford has recently come out and Monk is clumsily courting adorable neighbour Coralie (Erika Alexander), all adding complexity to the breezy story. The need for cash to help care for his mom ends up tempting Monk to allow the money to flow in for Fuck. There’s even a multi-million-dollar movie deal in play with a grimy director Wiley Valdespino (expertly performed by Adam Brody).

The cast is uniformly excellent, with Wright’s Monk the perfectly perplexed professor as he struggles to process the woke white agenda for Black arts. Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, the film intelligently and sometimes hilariously explores well-meaning, liberal white efforts to “bestow” empowerment on Black people, only further othering them in the process.

Smart filmmaking that’s not afraid to use comedy to make powerful points, American Fiction is one of the year’s best.