American Fiction (2023)

Watched 3/3/24 (VOD)

Right from the start was taken by the charm, music, and literary wit on display. Shades of Sideways and some frightfully dead-on satire was a mix I wasn’t expecting but was excited to see more of. Unfortunately, the script never found its footing for me, running out of steam with its satirical bite-turned-nibble and always feeling underdeveloped on the family melodrama front. As the stories progressed, it became obvious that writer/director Cord Jefferson became overexcited with his ideas, subsequently getting lost between two very different movies where no person or idea is given nearly enough time or thought to marinate in a satisfying way. There are ingredients here that are just never cooked in a confident, uniform fashion, finally exiting the oven as an underbaked potpourri of often hokey, misleading melodrama and eventually-undefined cultural criticism with lackluster character wrap-ups.

Going character by character, they can all illustrate my thesis in similar ways. Sterling K Brown. Awesome, awesome actor. Put Sterling K Brown in more movies—every movie. Well, this movie really understands his talents but literally gives him less than 15 minutes of screentime. His big moment comes when he realizes that his mom is homophobic but then what? He doesn’t confront her, it doesn’t lead to any real conflict with Monk, he doesn’t stop doing blow. And then he’s happy-go-lucky at the end. Felt like they forgot a scene in the back third.

The Coraline character. She’s set up in a really strange way with that “ex-husband” being a huge, ominous red herring. That interaction is extremely strange, but not as strange as the way the movie forgets to resolve anything with her in the back half. And if you want to call it a Sideways ripoff, which it is and which is a movie I love, I have similar problems with that ending where we never get any resolution. And this just does it as one of its many fake endings. It just feels awkward and trimmed so that they don’t have to write more of the sappy stuff that often lands with a thud in this movie for me.

The Issa Rae character. This confrontation toward the end was so bland for me, felt like they kept dancing around the conversation with Issa angrily asking questions but never providing coherent motivations/opinions. Was I just supposed to think she is corrupt and delusional as thinking her making money off of writing about other people’s stories is that much different from Monk’s? Neither of them seem to have been through what they’re writing about I just don’t understand what that has to say at the end of the day. I would have liked to have maybe heard from someone who had been through some of the stuff they wrote about I think that could have been more interesting. 

The mom and the maid. The mom gets Alzheimer’s and the maid yells at a nurse and then she gets married… I was not satisfied with those endings, despite the maid and her eventual husband having one of the sweeter wedding scenes in recent memory. You keep waiting for some kind of revelation and it never comes with any of these supporting characters. Instead this movie just bounces around way too much for my take. Even the endings, some of which I liked quite a bit, are all just clear signs that this movie had no idea where to go. Poor structure, but a lot to look forward to with this writer/director, in my humble opinion.

5.25/10