American Fiction is the 2023 TIFF audience award winner, in the most ironic twist of the year, just a short time after Green book took home that award, along with the “bafflingly tone deaf” award that it should have gotten. This feels like the course correction we needed, a heavy satire from Cord Jefferson about the simplification of the black experience through literature and the blinding white guilt fueling the entertainment industry.
Jeffrey Wright returns to a leading role in this film, surrounded by some really memorable and tonally perfect performances. His dry delivery didn’t always work for me but he held his own with an endearing characterisation and some genuinely laugh out loud jokes to make the runtime fly by.
Monk Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is a college professor and writer’s blocked writer, aspiring to publish his next book soon. His approach to teaching lands him a suspension which aligns with a book convention he’s going to, where he is introduced to Sinatra Golden (Issa Rae) an unconventional writer, who is revered for her recent work “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto”. Monk feels that this type of story simplifies the black experience to one that is pandering to the white audience, feeling like the story is “important” and “relevant” to the times we live in.
He endeavours to write his own version, which he originally titles “My Pafology”. We see a quick scene of him conceptualising the book before watching the meteoric success of the book with critics and audiences around the country.
This journey of conflicting morals is set to the backdrop of a family drama of the loss of his sister, reconnecting with his brother and dealing with his mother beginning to show signs of alzheimers.
The story itself is engaging, in its two parts, both bringing different elements of intrigue to their sections, but not exactly aligning or gelling in tone from one to the other. The family drama takes a more serious approach, which at times can jolt you out of the fun you were having during the book section, and watching the ridiculousness of some of the people that Monk interacts with as part of his book promotion. The opposite also happens, where you are pulled out of a darker scene and into a jokey one. While I think the lightness in the film is vital to the storytelling, I feel that the blending of the two was a bit harsh at times, not really feeling cohesive as a narrative. The film had me questioning the runtime too with the volume of ideas and subplots packed into it.
For me, the film also differentiated the book and life sections through technical presentation, with some different approaches to camera and lighting, with a lot of the book sections feeling colder and more clinical in their look, compared to the warmth and familiarity of the home life. While the home life sections weren’t always warm and comforting, the look was consistently inviting and smooth. The book section leaned more into the defined comedy look that a lot of films do, with flat lighting and simplistic production design.
These decisions matched with the tones of each section pretty religiously but again, did take a second to acclimatise to once we switched up the setting.
One thing that was consistent throughout the film was the jazzy score from Laura Karpman. The music was throughout, often just jazzing its way through the background of a scene, ramping up at random times as jazz seems to do. I had a lovely time with this score.
As I mentioned, I wasn’t blown away by Jeffrey Wright in this, I thought he did a good job with the character but when your main character is so straight-laced and sarcastic it can be hard to fully connect. He has some really funny moments but for me, the funniest parts were the connections between characters which I think Sterling K. Brown, Erika Alexander, and Tracee Ellis Ross did so well in creating.
I also found Issa Rae such a welcome addition to this cast, playing Sinatra, the opposing author to Monk. There is a really interesting conversation between them both as they join the “hugely diverse” judging panel for book of the year. They discuss the singularity of black stories and repetition of themes that find wide success. Monk is against the idea that these works should be the only black stories celebrated and oftentimes are without much depth to them at all. Sinatra disagrees that the stories are less valid, arguing that she put a huge amount of research into her book and is also feeding demand in the market. I think this conversation is pretty universal to any minority group writing about their experiences and how the focus on differences can be exploitative and reductive to the experiences of that community. There is also a very valid argument from Sinatra that the market is demanding the stories, and why not have a black author tell a black story, profiting in a space that has been so dominated by straight white men for so long. I liked this conversation, and the emphasis it places on not taking a stance against which side is right or wrong. There are a couple of conversations like this in the film, lightly taking on these issues but being cautious not to seem like it was forcing a message or opinion into the audience's faces, telling them exactly how they should have felt after seeing it.
American Fiction satirises the infamous review phrase that a film is “so important to the times we live in”. Through the satire though, the film is one that I feel represents a story that is about the black experience, while also not making every aspect of the characters life be about how different they are. There are incredible films highlighting these differences, and perspectives that we have been lacking in media. It’s important to have these perspectives, but it's equally as important for us not to get stuck in diluting lives down to a specific struggle. We get a balance and reasoning for telling the story as it does. It shows that blackness is a part of their lives but doesn’t define every decision or issue in their lives. A lot of films get bogged down by pushing the issues to show strife and focus only on the fact that the character is having issues because of their oppression. It does this with some really funny jokes and a nice family dynamic to ease you in and get you by. It feels like a crowd pleaser and one that earned the TIFF audience award.
Comments