The TIFF People’s Choice Award winner delivers uncompromising commentary on the pressures and expectations placed on Black artists while maintaining a story full of humour and heart
Jeffrey Wright plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a dynamic character who is at once both cynical and filled with humanity (Courtesy of TIFF)
By Caelan Monkman
Satire is a notoriously challenging genre to execute well. It requires an intimate understanding — and often appreciation — of the subject being satirized, while simultaneously a recognition of the flaws and dissonances that exist within that very subject.
It’s here that American Fiction writer and director Cord Jefferson truly prevails. Jefferson is accomplishing a doubly challenging task, tackling satire and adapting the film’s screenplay from a book — Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure — another famously difficult feat. This accomplishment is all the more impressive given this is Jefferson’s first feature film.
The film follows Thelonious "Monk" Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a struggling author who keeps finding himself pigeonholed as a “Black writer” while simultaneously being told by editors that his works “aren’t Black enough.”
Dealing with various personal and family problems, including the death of his sister and an aging mother who is succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk is feeling the pressure to succeed as a writer to support his family. But with white editors and audiences continuously deciding on his behalf what is and isn’t “Black enough,” Monk can’t seem to catch a break.
This is until, in an act of frustration, he submits a draft to his editor titled ‘My Pafology’ — an over-the-top story filled with clichés about Black communities — under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. To his surprise, it is loved by his editor, and he’s offered the largest book deal of his career.
What follows is a whirlwind series of events that results in Monk finding anonymous success for his work while simultaneously disagreeing with the very art he is now forcing himself to create.
In a Q&A with Jefferson following the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, he explained that he didn’t want the film to feel like a lecture. The film succeeds in doing this, managing to walk the tightrope of satirizing without spoonfeeding the audience, trusting them to understand the messaging in the film, but without pandering to them either.
Jefferson, whose writing credits include the award-winning HBO shows Watchmen and Succession, was a journalist before making the transition to writing for TV — and now film. As a Black journalist, Jefferson was often asked to cover what he calls the ‘racism beat,’ a “revolving door of misery and tragedy” that focused on stories of tragedy and racism befalling communities of colour rather than stories that uplift them.
Here, Jefferson experienced firsthand the same things Monk does in American Fiction. Grappling with the commercialization and fetishization of the “true Black experience”, the film explores how, as stated in one of the more poignant lines of the film, “White people think they want the truth, but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.”
The resulting film is one that is both bitingly funny and depressingly real. With exceptional performances across the board, and worth mentioning a delightfully lush and jazzy score from Laura Karpman, American Fiction is a terrific start to the hopefully long list of feature films to come from Cord Jefferson.