If cinema is, as Roger Ebert called it, a machine that generates empathy, few works have ever expressed the sentiment of exasperation quite like American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. At its centre is Jeffrey Wright in a once-in-a-lifetime performance, sighing, deadpanning, and raising his eyebrows a fraction of a millimetre to show how very close he is to giving up in the face of the unshakable stupidity that is modern culture.
It takes about 30 seconds for American Fiction to stake its claim. Wright’s Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an author and professor foolish enough to think “we’re all adults here” is ample cover to analyse and discuss the work of a writer such as Flannery O’Connor in a modern college environment. When a young white student demands he (a Black man) remove the title of one of O’Connor’s short stories from the board (it contains the N-word), we recognise the years that Monk has spent swimming against the tide in one simple closeup.
