Movie Recommendation: American Fiction

Dir. Cord Jefferson, 2023

I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!

I only recommend movies I loved watching and am eager for you to see.

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I went into American Fiction expecting what I saw in the trailer: a satire about the burden of representation, following a wealthy novelist and academic named Monk who, out of professional resentment and with a little bit of liquor, writes a parody of the trauma porn story expected of him because he’s black. The parody becomes a huge hit among white people, and hijinks ensue.

That story is in this movie, but it’s roughly about a third of it. American Fiction is also a story about a middle aged writer who still struggles to figure out how to connect with people. American Fiction is also a story about a family coming together to deal with their matriarch’s end-of-age care and unveiling secrets and suppressions they have to confront in order to heal from the suicide of their father.

You may notice that these are three tonally very different stories. The crazy thing is that this movie nails it: it weaves elegantly between pathos and irony, realness and absurdity, drama and satire. It never once blinks. At one point Monk’s brother says, “People want to love you, for some reason,” and that’s more or less what holds this movie together, Monk’s seemingly irrepressible need to bang his head against walls and somehow actually open passageways through them. You’re cheering for him the whole time.

The roller-coaster ride of emotions American Fiction puts you through is so tight, it even gets away with the line, “Of course you’re invited, you’re family.” Nary a snicker in the movie theatre, that line hit when it landed. That’s just amazing.

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And so, back to the satire about the burden of representation. When everybody was doing best-films-of-the-decade lists in 2019, I posted this to Facebook:

Best movies of the decade go to American black cinema in general.

Get Out, Moonlight, and Sorry to Bother You are luminous examples on the big screen. I really enjoyed Dear White People and BlacKkKlansman despite various criticisms of them.

I may have saw better movies or movies that I liked more, but honestly I currently remember and hope to continue remembering this decade for when cinematographers started saying, "Naw bro, this is how you light black faces."

[One great film for the decade is] An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, a movie that still excites me years later. If there's any movie I listed you missed, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is the one I most urge you to see.

I’m well aware that once you start noticing a trend like that, it’s probably already peaked. You’ll notice that all the titles I cite are about the alienation of black people in American culture, which is a problem because it generalizes their experience. If every black story is about alienation, then it reenforces that to be black is to be alienated, which is not true.

This issue is one reason I enjoyed The Unknown Country and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt so much last year. They were presentations of non-white American communities that leaned heavily into experiences like belonging and joy while still telling intimate personal stories. I like them for the same reason I like movies like Certain Women or Blue Jay: movies about Americans set outside the big cities or elite subcultures that describe people with unique experiences. These movies are all specific and personal in order to tell stories that are universal and human.

American Fiction points out that it if was merely a movie about a professor trying to find connection while handling his dysfunctional family, it probably wouldn’t get the attention it deserves. It grabs your attention through irony.

To be clear, it did so in a manner that was very, very funny. The trailer is still a great representation of the fun you’ll have while watching! You’ll just get a bonus couple of really great dramas embedded in there as well, leaving you asking if we can have more like those without the need for black filmmakers to jump through the hoops of ‘describing their experiences.’

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See more of my movie recommendations here: