Review by Andrew Swafford
Although the life of a film critic may seem lavish and swanky to readers raised on Ratatouille, I’m actually living the increasingly untenable life of a schoolteacher – more specifically, teaching the subject of this film’s title. When the opening scene presented protagonist Thelonius Ellison (a gleefully, overtly allusive name) trying and failing to initiate a class discussion on the problematic-yet-nonetheless-brilliant work of Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor, I damn near had a trauma flashback. And as someone who has encountered more than my fair share of Young Adult literature in the education world, I’m well-acquainted with the world of liberal-pandering fiction that this film is lampooning. I could name more than a handful of prominent authors Issa Rae’s character is essentially playing here, but I don’t want to come across as attacking any of them – they’re doing important work of consciousness-raising, as Cord Jefferson’s film eventually concedes. But the writing? It often ain’t great.
In American Fiction, Thelonius Ellison is an unhappy teacher and an unsuccessful writer whose work is considered by major (white, liberal) publications to be “not black enough.” And as someone devoted to the craft of writing, he refuses to write the sort of broad-strokes trauma-porn they tend to publish. Hilariously, Thelonius goes what I hope the kids still call “Joker Mode” (or is it “Goblin Mode?”) and writes the most blaxploitation-esque crime “memoir” imaginable. And although the act of writing can be notoriously difficult to make visually compelling in film, American Fiction employs what I’m assuming is a novel approach: letting actors play the scene as he’s writing it, breaking the fourth wall with the film audience but also an internal wall between the writer-character and his constructions. I’m only describing one small element of the maniacal, ever-evolving plot of American Fiction, a film Cord Jefferson has somehow sold to Amazon, presumably on account of the fact that it looks and feels like an Amazon original movie.
Many of the plot’s hyperactive pivots make the drama feel either unbearably schmaltzy or undeniably moving depending on your taste for the Big Streamer Original Movie Industrial Complex. By the film’s end, however, all prior cliché emotional beats begin to feel increasingly deliberate in their manipulativeness – as if Cord Jefferson (if that IS his real name) has himself insincerely written the most compulsively watchable soap opera he can as a way of smuggling past (white, liberal) corporate gatekeepers. Jefferson’s background is in journalism (Gawker, USA Today, The Huffington Post, The New York Times Magazine) and television (The Good Place, Watchmen, Succession), and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the type of writing (or rather, “content”) that attracts / holds eyeballs (as well as whose eyeballs they are). American Fiction seems designed to capture the eyeballs of the biggest white liberal audience possible so that Jefferson can teach some hard truths about their exploitative media diets while keeping them laughing every step of the way.