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American Fiction
Feb. 13th, 2024 02:30 pmI was immediately drawn in by the trailer for this film, so much so that I marked my calendar with the date of its release and was very keen to go and see it in the cinema.
It's about a Black author who is told his books aren't 'Black enough' to be popular - so he writes a terribly cliched story of 'Black culture' as a protest against the reductive nature of the white publishing establishment - and, of course, it sells and is extremely popular.
Only that's not really what it's about at all...
The film I saw last night is not the film as portrayed in the trailer - as is so often the case these days - but it's possible there may be a more nuanced and subversive strategy at work with this one than usual.
Monk (Jeffrey Wright) wants to tell intellectual and multi-faceted stories that show more layers to Black creators and lives than are generally seen in the films and books that get made. And the very nature of that dilemma shows itself in the fact that the absurdist comedy aspects of the film were the ones emphasised in the trailer - whereas they only take up about 15% of the running time. The rest is an intellectual and multi-faceted story about a middle-class Black family and their struggles to relate to each other and find their way through their mundane but universal struggles.
It gets very meta in the last ten minutes (which really brought it together in my view) but the whole film is a demonstration of its own argument about what white audiences want to see from Black stories.
My favourite moment was when Monk and another Black writer were arguing against a book by a Black author winning a literary prize. The other three (white) judges over-ruled them, saying, "It's important that we listen to Black voices right now," while of course blatantly ignoring the views of the Black judges...
It was a masterful moment, delivered much more effectively than I've described it.
Overall, a really interesting, compelling and cleverly put-together film. And also always good to see Sterling K Brown on screen.
It's about a Black author who is told his books aren't 'Black enough' to be popular - so he writes a terribly cliched story of 'Black culture' as a protest against the reductive nature of the white publishing establishment - and, of course, it sells and is extremely popular.
Only that's not really what it's about at all...
The film I saw last night is not the film as portrayed in the trailer - as is so often the case these days - but it's possible there may be a more nuanced and subversive strategy at work with this one than usual.
Monk (Jeffrey Wright) wants to tell intellectual and multi-faceted stories that show more layers to Black creators and lives than are generally seen in the films and books that get made. And the very nature of that dilemma shows itself in the fact that the absurdist comedy aspects of the film were the ones emphasised in the trailer - whereas they only take up about 15% of the running time. The rest is an intellectual and multi-faceted story about a middle-class Black family and their struggles to relate to each other and find their way through their mundane but universal struggles.
It gets very meta in the last ten minutes (which really brought it together in my view) but the whole film is a demonstration of its own argument about what white audiences want to see from Black stories.
My favourite moment was when Monk and another Black writer were arguing against a book by a Black author winning a literary prize. The other three (white) judges over-ruled them, saying, "It's important that we listen to Black voices right now," while of course blatantly ignoring the views of the Black judges...
It was a masterful moment, delivered much more effectively than I've described it.
Overall, a really interesting, compelling and cleverly put-together film. And also always good to see Sterling K Brown on screen.
