Invisible Pan — American Fiction review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

Based on Percival Everett’s scalpel sharp, very funny 2001 novel Erasure, American Fiction is a rather timid, disappointingly broad satirical sideswipe at the institutional racism at the heart of the US publishing industry, one that picks at some fairly low hanging fruit and, unlike the book, doesn’t seem to have a particularly great understanding of the world it’s attempting to eviscerate. That it provides Jeffrey Wright with an all-too-rare leading role is a minor blessing that only reinforces how weak the rest of the film is.

He plays Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison, a writer of dense, experimental fiction that his agent has a hard time selling because it doesn’t trade in the demeaning, exploitative stereotypes that white readers and critics applaud with superlatives about “rawness” and “authenticity”. Bristling at the way he’s expected to define himself by his race in everything he does, he cranks out a crude fictionalised memoir of a lowly criminal in the urban street patois he’s recently seen celebrated in a new best-seller — wincingly titled ‘We’s Lives in Da Ghetto’ — by a younger, similarly educated Black writer named Sintara Golden (Issa Rae).

In the tradition of Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, Monk’s own satirical exercise in bad taste, initially titled ‘My Pafology’, is embraced without irony and becomes both a runaway success and the frontrunner for a major literary award. Naturally Monk despairs, yet he goes along with the farce, partly motivated by the financial burden imposed on him by a recent family tragedy, one that doesn’t make much sense in the context of the story, largely because writer/director Cord Jefferson is too scared to engage with a subplot from the book involving a murder at an abortion clinic, even though he goes to the trouble of setting it up.

But that’s par for the course here.

Where Percival’s book re-litigated many of the debates that have swirled around landmark literary works by the likes of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Richard Wright and Monk’s literary namesake Ralph Ellison, the film, perhaps assuming its audience aren’t big readers, uses clips from movies like New Jack City and Get Rich or Die Tryin’, never bothering to distinguish which are written and directed by Black filmmakers and which are the work of white writers and directors. When its characters do discuss other writers, it gets the details wrong, at one point likening Bret Easton Ellis to Charles Bukowski as a writer obsessed with the gutter-dwellers and the disenfranchised. Yes, Bret Easton Ellis.

Although there are a couple of amusing sight gags that slyly reinforce some of the film’s themes, American Fiction works best when focusing on Monk’s fraught relationship with his middle-class family, making the point that there’s enough drama in Monk’s own life to draw on for inspiration without having to crank out parodies of Blackness that the publishing industry is too blinkered to recognise as such. That said, the film’s current status as a serious awards contender has provided an unintentionally amusing meta-commentary on the performative nature of awards in general, so, erm, credit where it’s due. As the plot starts focussing on the inevitable movie adaptation of Monk’s book, however, its liberal borrowings from Robert Altman’s The Player only reinforce the extent to which American Fiction is the sort of film The Player railed against — the sort that pulls its punches.