hings only get worse as soon as Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction begins. And things were already pretty bad to start with: the movie opens with its writer protagonist, Monk (Jeffrey Wright), being asked by the college where he lectures to take a leave of absence — an effect of an increasing weakness for berating sensitive students who get on his nerves. A little after flying back home to regroup, his sister — who’s also been taking care of their mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams) — has a fatal heart attack. A separate trip to the hospital sometime after clarifies that Agnes’ mounting forgetfulness is actually Alzheimer’s, and that it’s imperative that Monk and his brother, Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), find her an assisted living facility to live in as soon as possible.
But with what money? Monk hasn’t published a book in years, and now doesn’t have his usual school salary to rely on. The sister, financially wiped out after her recent divorce, didn’t leave anything substantial behind. And Cliff, once a lucrative plastic surgeon, has lost practically everything after his wife caught him in bed with a man. (Whatever money the mercurial Cliff has these days goes to pain-numbing drugs and drinks.)
This all sets the stage for what American Fiction comes to primarily be about: the white-dominated mainstream’s tendency to commercially embrace Black stories, whether on screen or in the literary sector to which Monk devotes his life, not when they aim for “truth” but, to paraphrase one character, make the white people who engage with them feel “absolved.” Monk’s frustrations with that, egged on by the vexing ubiquity of a new novel called We’s Lives in the Ghetto by an up-and-coming author (Issa Rae) he sees as pandering, moves him to write a book indulging all the white gaze-friendly tropes that frustrate him. He’s calling it My Pafology for now. It’s an exercise lavish with crack, deadbeat dads, and the climactic killing of its lead by the police, written under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. It’s also intimated that, in his current financial predicament, there’s a maybe subconscious glimmer inside of Monk who wants the monetary relief its potential success could provide him.
That potential success is actualized, to Monk’s bemusement, almost immediately. His latest manuscript had, before this, been rejected nine times in a climate where, as his weary agent (John Ortiz) puts it, publishers are simply looking for more of a “Black book.” My Pafology, in contrast, is seen by an assortment of lily-white publishers desperate to be lauded for their progressivism as “raw” and “real.” American Fiction’s satirization of white neoliberals garners easy laughs, sometimes without the assistance of dialogue; the publisher offering the biggest advance — a whopping $750,000 — is flanked in her office chair by a silkscreen dyad of Ruth Bader Ginsburg portraits.
The more success Monk sees under this nom de plume — from which he further distances himself by claiming publicly that Leigh’s name obscures the real identity of a fugitive — the more his soul seems to rot. He starts lashing out; it’s the most damaging when it’s inflicted on his love interest, a lawyer named Coraline (Erika Alexander) who picks up a copy of My Pafology (which Monk belligerently renames Fuck) and says she likes it.
Jefferson has called Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) the spiritual ancestor to American Fiction. (In that sharp comedy, an aspiring actor, also played by Townsend, struggles to figure out whether it’s worth seeing his creative ambitions through in an industry that often makes him fulfill Black stereotypes.) Many of their bruising laughs, namely the depressing hilarity deriving from white neoliberal racism, share a foundation. But while Hollywood Shuffle felt like a much-needed corrective to current industry ills, American Fiction’s broad targets feel timelier to the period during which its source material (the 2001 book Erasure, by Percival Everett) was published.
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction. All American Fiction photography by Claire Folger/Orion Releasing.
This is not to suggest that the things with which it takes issue have entirely dissipated in the last couple of decades: much of the atmosphere recalls how, in the summer of 2020, there was an uptick in temporary interest by white consumers in Black art to publicly make clear to others that they were, in fact, “good” white people. It’s more that it’s proner to point out long-familiar areas of white ignorance without going places that make its declarations feel like more than just declarations.
It reserves the bulk of its knottiness in that area for the end of the film, like when Monk and the Rae character finally have a conversation and his inferences about her motivations and the substance of her work (he’s never actually read We’s Lives in the Ghetto) are called into question, or when he hashes out, with a white producer with a hankering for making so-called issue movies (Adam Brody), what would be the best ending for a movie adaptation of his work impossibly tasked, with its commercial objectives, with being simultaneously “real” and flattering to a white neoliberal palate.
The shortcomings of American Fiction don’t extend to its uniformly good ensemble. Wright, always wonderful, does rich work as Monk, a man brimming with so much creative frustration that he hasn’t noticed, until the newfound tumult of his family life, how much it’s seeped into his life in other ways. Both his siblings tsk-tsk about his penchant for basically disappearing from their lives when he’s going through a particularly hard time. (He’s also made newly aware of how much his treatment as both his parents’ favorite has come at the expense of his brother and sister, who have been hip to certain familial problems for decades that Monk is just now beginning to understand.)
Brown is excellent, too, as a raw nerve of a man whose new recognition of his identity has also created new wounds. They slash his now-destroyed marriage and relationship with his kids; they’re also made by the ambiguity around whether his late dad and his mother, in her right mind, would accept him the way he’s learned to accept himself. The family drama of American Fiction is, of course, employed as a pointed rebuttal to the narrative of Fuck, unfolding as an implicit confirmation that this — what’s “real” — would ostensibly never receive the same mass-market attention as a Black narrative with Fuck’s same appetite for sordidness and stereotype.
Though the work of American Fiction’s actresses is strong, dimension and interiority are things only the male leads in the movie receive. They become, as Peyton Robinson noted in a recent review, “accessories to the story,” all made into not much more than vehicles getting Monk to a new emotional or intellectual destination. So much of the often very-good American Fiction is about the exasperation coming from limitations imposed by another. The frustrations one might feel from American Fiction come from limitations it imposes on itself.
From The Iron Claw. Courtesy of A24.
Sean Durkin makes movies about people living in another person’s fantasy, only realizing the extent of its destructiveness after it’s too late for anything resembling a clean break from it. The Iron Claw, his first biopic, is about the Von Erich family, a clan of He-Man-haired wrestlers that made its name in the 1980s now most associated with what many in that milieu look at as a curse. All but one Von Erich progeny died prematurely, most by suicide, one by freak accident, and one by medical condition ostensibly induced by wrestling-related stresses.
Durkin uses the second-oldest son and sole “survivor,” Kevin (Zac Efron), as his conduit to look into a family dynamic poisoned by familiar my-dream-is-your-dream toxicity, engendered by a retired-wrestler patriarch, Fritz (Holt McCallany), who abided by the belief that if the Von Erichs “were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us.” Image-obsessed Fritz often offhandedly ranked his “favorite” sons, a practice he tried softening by assuring the kids that the placements “can always change.” Divergence from what he projected onto them was implicitly forbidden, with one brother’s interest in music, for instance, subjected to the kind of parental strictness that would never arise if it were wrestling he wanted to more seriously pursue.
Durkin makes some narrative cuts, for “practical” reasons, that rob the film of some additional dimension from which it might have benefitted. He writes out another brother who also died too soon; he misleadingly suggests it was only Kevin who’d marry and have kids among the siblings. But the biopic is, of course, a genre long beleaguered with dismaying storytelling choices. One could think (I did) that Durkin was subtly attempting to preemptively defend his narrative decision-making with a pre-opening-credit title card telling us that this only is “inspired” by a true story.
The Iron Claw is good enough that its extractions only impede its scope rather than doom it altogether. For a movie thematically susceptible to sports-movie shmaltz and family-melodrama trappings, Durkin largely keeps things even-keeled, refusing to unhandily indulge the temptations of relentless miserablism or ultimately be misguidedly too happy to finally spin things into an “inspiring” tale of unthinkable adversity overcome. Such was true for his previous two movies, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and 2020’s The Nest, which too took potentially explosive stories but I thought successfully generated an impression of depicting things “as they were,” the emotional beats rarely obvious and satisfying “answers” withheld.
The Iron Claw‘s universally great ensemble makes the central, thorny family dynamic feel lived in. It’s a career-best Efron, though, who stands out the most as an older brother who can only do so much to protect his siblings. This also is maybe the first movie he’s starred in that has so effectively harnessed the brutality inherent to achieving the body he has for so long been famous for. The poignancy of that work is deployed cannily to make manifest, as the critic Lauren Michele Jackson recently put it, the punishments of the ring and the family that keeps him there, underlining the fragility conspicuous strength can hide.
Penélope Cruz in Ferrari. Courtesy of Neon/STX.
The only consistently dynamic thing about Ferrari, the great Michael Mann’s first movie since the ambivalently received Blackhat (2015), is Penélope Cruz. In the 1957-set film, she plays Laura, the long-suffering wife of the movie’s car-mogul namesake. The film is a rote biopic; it’s sunk the most by the too-American, almost impressively uncompelling performances from Adam Driver, for one thing too young to be playing a pushing-60 Enzo Ferrari, and Shailene Woodley as the long-term mistress with whom he shares a pre-teen son she’s impatient to stop hiding. In Ferrari, you tend to see the actor acting clearer than you can the person they’re supposed to be embodying.
But when Cruz is the nucleus of her too-few scenes, Ferrari temporarily revs to life. It pulses with the charge of a woman who lives her life constantly threatening to light what has become a short fuse on account of a man obsessed with besting himself finding ways to treat her like an afterthought — to take her for granted. (In her first scene, she points a gun at him and shoots, piercing the wall to the left of his head to prove a point.)
When not specifically concerned with Laura — which it isn’t very often — Ferrari chronicles the months leading up to a landmark (and also infamously disastrous) Mille Miglia race through Italy, shadowed by the recent death of Enzo and Laura’s young son and the growing-worse financial state of the Ferrari company this dangerous competition could potentially cure. The end of the movie, which is at least more concerned with its title character’s failures than wins, lines up with the incident that instantly remade the Mille Miglia from a thrill into a horror. It’s frighteningly portrayed on screen, effectively imbuing the movie that follows with a graveness and intensity it could have used elsewhere. After sitting through this mostly inert film, it struck me that that’s maybe where its story ought to have begun — something you’d rather not be thinking when you’re that close to the finish line.
Peterson Reviews 