American Fiction

Continuing on with our family movie week, we watched American Fiction over the weekend. If you haven't read the plot summary, a black author and literature professor (Thelonius, but he goes by Monk) gets in trouble at his university for traumatizing his fragile students by writing the n-word on the blackboard and is rusticated back to Boston for a spell. Since his high-brow books aren't having commercial success, and he sees another very well-educated Black woman author selling tons of books by publishing bullshit tales of blacks on the street full of Black patois ("I axed him fo some chicken" and so on), he gets drunk and writes a parodic novel from the point of view of a streetwise felon. Hilarious hijinks ensue.

The backdrop to all of this, which takes up most of the screen time, is conflict within his high-achieving family, from whom. His sister gets sick and dies while she and Monk are out for drinks, which was a bit far-fetched but one has to move the plot along. His recently out of the closet gay brother, a plastic surgeon out in LA, comes home from the funeral. Their mother has Alzheimer's coming on. Monk's always been the emotionally removed one, which causes problems in a new promising relationship with the charming neighbor across the street.

In short, real family shit of the sort one sees too little of in movies these days. Unironic and earnest, though punctuated with laughs for sure. Altogether the movie was like a throwback to the 70s and 80s before blockbusters and franchises came to unrelentingly dominate the screen, when Norman Lear permeated the zeitgeist and Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People won awards. Very refreshing.

Plus the fact that white people are almost entirely marginalized and treated as stereotypically earnest idiots. There was a lot of truth in there, it must be owned.