Geoffrey Wright is one of my favorite actors. I can’t remember how long this has been the case. He’s the right kind of character. Sophisticated, erudite, cerebral, suave. Well, that’s an aggregation of the things he can do that work. I think he makes for a great CIA handler on film as he had with the latest James Bond flicks. Not necessarily heroic, but never naive and never intellectually lazy. In his latest role, he plays Monk Ellison [seriously?], the protagonist in American Fiction, a delightful melodrama about people ‘who look like me’, the mendacity of American literary business and the pain of genius in isolation.
James Baldwin famously wrote that the dark side of every profession is that you get to see an intimate portrait of its guts from the inside. This is, I imagine easier to do in films about film than it is in films about literature, so it was easy to compare American Fiction to The Player and Bamboozled. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sorry for Spike Lee as I did then and do once again. The deftness of this film makes Lee seem to be a ham-handed ass clown. Then again, it hardly compares to The Player which is clearly a masterpiece.
American Fiction feels a bit forced. The revelation of characters could have used the kind of subtlety one would expect from a director like Spielberg or Wes Anderson. If you’re going to get a quirky dysfunctional family of New England black doctors the good times have to be as weird as the bad times. Yet in this film the extra effort is made to get people around a dinner table as a ritual in solemn yet persnickety upscale manners. Things like that went clunk.
As a race movie, it did what was expected without the necessity of veins bursting from foreheads. All of the white actors did what they were told, which was to portray two dimensional parodies of themselves with no interior motivations that couldn’t be explained to fifth grade DEI students. As a film within a film it was a hilarious triumph. The ending is a masterstroke and provided to me the greatest laugh of the entire story, which suits me just fine. In that regard it is a deft little film that might have gone 15 fewer minutes if the dialog gave us a bit more interiority. As it stands there’s probably only three memorable lines, but they’re good ones.
It was weird watching something not quite a Wes Anderson movie, something not quite a Spielberg family tale, something not quite whatever it is a Tyler Perry movie might be. It’s not a thrilling expose, nor a heavy drama that leaves you shaken, but it’s much better than most of the race flicks we’re supposed to consume as part of a compete breakfast. It has all the vitamins and minerals without sci-fi basements with horse-creatures or genetic body swapping. On the other hand, it’s completely over the top once or twice too often to be anything but a troubled comedy that would have been better told with a darker sense of humor. In that regard it’s a bit out of balance, which makes it a movie emblematic of 2024. Which shelf is appropriate?
Now I’m going to have to go watch something by Zadie Smith, or maybe I’ll go back to August Wilson. Congrats to the Oscar winner, that’s high cotton.