"American Fiction": An Entrée, or a Main Course?

Does Cord Jefferson's feature debut, "American Fiction", know what it wants to say or what kind of film it wants to be?

American Fiction, Cord Jefferson Cunningham (2023)

Around halfway into American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, there’s a moment when a literary agent says that “nobody in Hollywood reads”. When a studio filmmaker comes to translate a novel to the screen, “they get their assistants to read things and then summarise them. The whole town runs on book reports”. This dislodged the proverbial penny so that it finally dropped, and I thought, “That’s what’s wrong with this film.” Not that I think Jefferson didn’t actually read Everett’s novel, but the excoriating, frenetic original has been so diluted and sanitised for the screen that it plays like the visual book report of someone who didn’t engage very deeply with the material, and who finds parts of it distasteful. As a result, things are rather safe here.

But let’s take this from the top, and also with what there is to enjoy in American Fiction – of which there’s plenty. Jeffrey Wright is heartfelt…