“I just think we should really be listening to Black voices right now,” says a white jury member during the debate for a prestigious literary prize, in a pivotal scene in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. The irony is that she and the other white jurors have just brushed aside the opinions of the two Black writers on the jury; the unspoken caveat is that the gatekeepers of American literature are happy to tune into Black voices, but only as long as they are saying the right thing. It’s a toe-curling depiction of tone-deaf sanctimony that is almost too bluntly on the nose. It’s to the credit of Jefferson, who makes his feature directing debut with this savvy, jazzy, Oscar-nominated satire, and to a never-better Jeffrey Wright as irascible writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, that the film feels as deft and light on its feet as it does, despite occasionally unsubtle moments such as this one and a divisive, archly meta final 10 minutes.
Adapted by Jefferson from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, American Fiction is an erudite, rather more elegant take on the same themes as those explored in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. There, a disillusioned TV writer ironically pitches a minstrel show, only for it to become a smash hit; here, writer and academic Thelonious, enraged by the rejections of his complex, finely wrought literary offerings, dashes off a piece of hoodsploitation trash fiction as an intellectual prank. But is the joke on the publishers, who offer Thelonious – or rather his fugitive ex-con alter ego – a $750,000 advance for the book? Or is it on Thelonious, who finds himself in a financial hole and thus unable to turn down the money?
The story works on two levels, first as a prickly critique of the pressures facing Black creatives. But equally satisfying is its depiction of the abrasive, complicated dynamics in a high-achieving family. Tracee Ellis Ross, in the picture all too briefly, is terrific as Thelonious’s doctor sister; her scenes opposite Wright have a bracingly sharp-edged heart and humour.
