American Fiction (2023) *****

 

In Radha Blank's 2020 film “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Radha raps about “poverty porn.”

“Yo, it’s poverty porn,

you regular Blacks are just such a yawn.

If I want

to get on,

better write me some poverty porn.”

She was talking about ghetto stories of drug abuse, crime, single mothers, and cop shootings, turned into a sort of pornography for middle-class America to gawk at and feel smug for feeling pity. Her character in the film, a frustrated playwright, finds that poverty porn is what the white people around her- her agent, her producer, and her audience- seem to want and expect from a black artist.

Blank isn't the first black artist to express frustration at being pushed to make poverty porn. Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure explores the same theme, and now screenwriter/director Cord Jefferson has brought that book to film with “American Fiction”. Jeffrey Wright plays Monk Ellison, an English professor whose white students pitch self-righteous fits when he assigns them books that contain the N-word. He is also a writer struggling to get his latest novel published. Ellison writes about universal themes, but because he is black, his books tend to get filed in the African-American Studies section, and publishers hint that they would be quicker to publish something more “relevant to the black experience.” Poverty porn, in other words.

Ellison looks around and sees another black writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) having great success with her book “We's Lives in da Ghetto.” Golden's book, written in inner city vernacular, is straight poverty porn, and white liberals are lapping it up. Out of frustration, Ellison sits down and writes his own poverty porn story. He sends the book out under a pseudonym, assuming that publishers will recognize it as a joke. Instead, publishers embrace the book as a genuine depiction of the black experience, and Ellison finds himself with a best-seller on his hands.

Meanwhile, Ellison's life is falling apart. His professor job is in jeopardy due to those sensitive, white students. His upper-middle-class family is struggling with his mother's new-onset dementia, and his siblings, both doctors, are not able to help as much as they should. The reclusive Monk is forced to become a caregiver while coming to terms with his estranged siblings and dealing with his late father's legacy of infidelity.

“American Fiction” is a very sneaky movie. Ellison's family drama is actually the kind of Oscar-bait story that we see all the time in film, but almost always featuring a white family. Being black, Hollywood would typically depict Ellison's family as poor, and someone would end up getting shot by the police. Director Cord Jefferson's big trick is that in the middle of a sharp, funny satire about black artists and poverty porn, he gets us to watch a universal drama about a family that is struggling despite their wealth and education, who just happen to be black.

5 stars out of 5