There are two movies in American Fiction. One is a fairly basic family melodrama - middle age-ish siblings, victimized by nasty divorces, a deteriorating parent. Not bad at all, just not particularly special. The main character Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed "Monk", played by lovable Jeffrey Wright, described his family as something he would much rather avoid, and I was kind of disappointed because I couldn't really see what was so bad. The second movie is a brilliant satire about race relations. It starts with the very first scene where a white student with blue hair storms out of Monk's class because she is triggered by the n-word in the title of a book her black professor is making her read. It only gets better from there. The first movie serves as a fodder for the second making sure Monk cannot afford to get out of the predicament at the center of the satire. They converge in a movie within a movie kind of way, making me wonder if the family drama is also supposed to exemplify the kind of story Monk would prefer to write, but cannot get published, because, apparently, it's not the type of black story that publishers want. It's got two doctors, a lawyer, an academic. A live-in maid, a beach house, upper middle class financial woes. But if Monk is supposed to be a genuinely good writer, that story doesn't quite showcase that.
Review of American Fiction
