American Fiction is much better than American Reality

American Fiction (2023)

American Fiction is the first “Oscar-bait” movie I have seen this season and I was pleasantly surprised.  Usually, I am annoyed by pretentious writing, overacting, or unnecessary scenes.  American Fiction was a tidy, sub-two-hour black comedy that is full of excellent performances in minor roles and a terrific lead performance from Jeffrey Wright.  Wright plays a semi-successful author whose high end novels fail to cater to the internalized racism of the primarily white audience.  After dealing with some personal tragedy, Wright’s character Monk becomes disillusioned and writes a stereotypical, reductive story about a gangbanger that has no truth and submits it to his publisher under a pseudonym as a joke.  The joke quickly ends when the white entertainment industry latches onto the empty story as a way to sate their white guilt by supporting a black author, but also reaffirm their biases by consuming another piece of “black media” that is only about violence and crime facing that community.  As his alter ego’s fame grows, Monk’s personal life spirals as he tries to hide his connection to the book while navigating the real struggles facing him and his family.  In order to keep the runtime down, the story does get rushed by some contrived coincidences as both aspects of Monk’s life, author and son, approach the climax.  This string of unlikely events was easily the worst part of the movie.  This plot device is overly simple for this type of movie.  In a poetic way, a movie about substandard writing fell into the trap of substandard writing.  But overall, the movie achieves its goal of making white people reflect, because at the end, when I stood up and saw that I was just enjoying this movie in a theater full of white people I immediately thought to myself “Am I part of the problem?”  And honestly, I don’t know.  So I will keep consuming media of all types to balance out any participation in problematic pieces and I will give this movie an excellent score, mostly because it was good and the rest because of internalized white guilt.  I give American Fiction 850 out of the 896 pages of the last fiction novel I read (Dune).