There are so many valuable lessons to be learned from attending a screening of American Fiction, like, which white people in the audience are laughing a little too hard at jokes about white people, and how loud CAN you snore during a film before you drive everyone else in the theater completely apoplectic, none of which is about the movie itself, but very much became my and Bestie’s experience while seeing our first movie together.
American Fiction at its core is constructed around the code-switching of upwardly mobile, upper middle class black folks, the delight in clownish mugging and thug tropes and the ignorant pandering of white liberals who want to be cool or supportive or inclusive or whatever. In many ways, these jokes about the black upper middle class are the atmosphere in which all other elements of the movie are suspended. The way I described it to Wife later when she asked (she saw it tonight, ten days after we went) was that American Fiction reminded me a lot of the biting irony of Sorry to Bother You, if Sorry to Bother You had jettisoned the absurdism of the third act.
The story toggles between a fairly unoriginal family drama filled with predictable scenes of dementia and self-sabotage and a much more creative and buoyant story about a gross caricature of black pain taking off in the art world. The ways in which Jeffrey Wright’s Monk plays out his imagination on screen are imaginative and funny, like the actors who perform his book in front of him. But for all of the caustic wit and drag of family drama, the third act is where American Fiction really shines, because it goes in so many directions, leaves the story polyvalent, floating, uncertain, and unresolved.
We were not prepared for the number of white people who were going to clap at the end of this movie, and as a public service announcement to the couple who failed to fully lock themselves in the bathroom as we walked by yikes! work on your door locks!, and if I can give you one thing that you absolutely have to pay attention to while you’re watching this movie it should be the way Jeffrey Wright eats and drinks everything: the absolutely stodgy way he spears his lettuce, the way he squares his shoulders while eating spaghetti, the hurried way he downs wine when confronted by a love interest’s boyfriend. All of it is pure genius.
