American Fiction

Very conflicted with this film. On one hand I think the screenplay is genius, it's full of just such brilliant comedic moments which are really smartly using social commentary and weaponizing it as satirical comedy, which I honestly think leaves more of an impact on you. However, I also think the screenplay is filled with completely trite moments which feel disingenuous especially compared to the main storyline of dealing with authenticity in art.

The film truly does shine in its reflection of what we deem authentic in artistic spaces, the film dealing with literature, but this could easily be extrapolated to any creative field. This dichotomy, explicitly shown through Wright and Rae's characters, is wildly fascinating and something I feel like is wholly unique to this film. The idea of Black stories being, in mass, a variety of the same stories and offers no "real" experience of what it's like, shaping Black people as being a singular idea instead of real realised people.

I like the journey Wright went on in the film from feeling like this and lashing out at people capitalising on this, to realising that it's not Black people who are creating this media who are the problem, it's the consumers. I also like how Rae says at the end, the reason she didn't like the book is cause there was no authenticity, her book which Wright argues is precisely like his, actually was her telling an authentic story, all be it not hers, as while the media landscape has painting Black people as singular, she says that is still someone's story. I do wish that the film dug into this just a bit more, the idea of more well-off people exploiting the stories of people who are from different classes and how they feel adding media into the landscape which just reinforces stereotypes.

I feel like that's a problem I had with the film as a whole, some really unique issues were tackled but they also sort of weren't. Most of the film is speaking through an issue and that's it, it's not really expounded upon more. I feel like it wasn't show, most of it was tell. Is this a problem when it's telling it in such a funny and palatable way? Perhaps not, but I think for wanting something deeper it just doesn't work.

I also thought most of the family stuff was completely irrelevant and felt very baity. What happens to his sister is just dismissed, his mum's story which is a lot of the film amounts to nothing, and I feel like his brother's story was odd. I will give it credit, it is good to just have such normality played out on screen, but it added nothing to the story. Also, and this is completely a small gripe, but I found it so noticeable, in a film which tries to discuss dangers of painting Black people as monolithic, to have gay characters and to basically be gay stereotypes felt so weird. I felt like Stirling K. Brown's scene was fully just to add emotion, but I felt nothing as I found honestly his performance to be inauthentic and just a scene to add some drama, was beyond strange.

It has a lot of flaws but it's also just so funny so I feel mixed