Satire often leans toward one of two directions — a scathing critique where no one gets spared or an outright farce that broadly spoofs the absurdity of a given scenario.
Filmmaker Cord Jefferson took a more compassionate path with “American Fiction,” his triumphant adaptation of Percival Everett’s acerbic 2005 novel “Erasure.” In this highly entertaining look at one modern Black American family in the Boston area, and a woke culture that isn’t nearly as woke as Americans like to think it is, Jefferson takes on hot-button issues such as race, ambition, family, sexual preference, academic pretense, the publishing industry, media misrepresentations about being Black, even aging.
Whew!
Jefferson’s feature debut focuses on a self-centered Black writer/professor (Jeffrey Wright, whom Jefferson envisioned in the role as he read the novel) who’s forced to reunite with — or, at the very least, try to engage with — his dysfunctional, highly intelligent family. He’s a struggling writer who bristles with outrage over the popularity of a female Black author (Issa Rae) whose stereotypically gritty “urban” novel is a literary hit. One drunken night, he pounds out his own gritty Black street opus and thus opens the door for some drama of his own.
“American Fiction” opens this week in area theaters.
Jefferson’s film wrangles with prickly issues that divide families and nations. His intention isn’t to scold or shame audiences.
“I didn’t want anybody to come to this movie and feel like they were being lectured to or having a finger wagged at them and telling them here’s why you should feel guilty or here’s why you should feel embarrassed or here’s why you should feel mad,” Jefferson said during his stop at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October. He was there to receive a Breakthrough Director award, while “American Fiction” also took home the fest’s audience award.
Thanks to “Fiction,” the 41-year-old Tucson native has made a splashy transition to the big screen. Jefferson has also worked as a journalist (he wrote music reviews and essays and worked as an editor at Gawker), and a TV writer, whose credits include episodes of “The Good Place,” Netflix’s “Master of None,” and HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Succession” series.
Jefferson, who looks like he could be a movie star as well, admits it’s a bit daunting to migrate from penning TV episodes to helming a feature film.
“One of the things that I really like about TV is that the length of it really allows you to dive deep into characters,” he said.
But with a less than two-hour running time for “American Fiction,” Jefferson didn’t have that luxury, plus he needed to take care to give equal weight to the characters surrounding Thelonious “Monk” Ellison: his mother (Leslie Uggams), his hard-working sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), his recently-out brother (Sterling K. Brown), a well-adjusted beach house neighbor and potential love interest (Erika Alexander) and the woman (Myra Lucretia Taylor) who has tended to the Ellison brood for decades.
“I didn’t want anybody to just be there kind of as window dressing, to help propel the plot,” Jefferson said. “I wanted to, as much as possible, make these characters feel like they’re fully realized and not just make Jeffrey the only real person.”
Alexander’s character of Coraline, the family beach house neighbor, benefits from that attention — creating a complex person who’s ending one relationship and moving forward. Her incandescent performance earned her an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting performance.
Alexander also appeared this year in the Oakland-set drama “Earth Mama” and is now producing a documentary on the groundbreaking actor Diahann Carroll. She praises Jefferson for having the perseverance to get “American Fiction” made.
“He has a very good balance of confidence and fear,” she said. “Because that’s what sends that shuttle up to the moon. You need to be confident that you can make it but all the time there’s that fear that things will just blow up.”
She credits the movie’s success to Jefferson’s knack for assembling a cast of character actors who work well as soloists and in an ensemble. She also cites Jefferson’s own upbringing — his mother was a white liberal and his father was a Black Republican and lawyer — as potential factors on why “American Fiction” resonates across the board.
Jefferson agrees that his background influenced the look and tone of the film.
“I grew up in this interesting household,” he said. “Nothing was sort of spoon fed to me. It was sort of like you need to figure out the world on your own and decide about how you feel about things.”
One lesson he learned that figures in “American Fiction” — and much of what he writes — is that “nothing is good or bad.”
His 7- or 8-year-old self picked up that message while watching TV with his father, who was a defense attorney at the time. A local station flashed a mugshot of a suspect on the screen.
“And I called the guy a bad guy,” he said. “My dad said: ‘There’s no such thing as bad guys. There are people doing bad things. But there is no such thing as bad people.’”
“And that’s something I think about all the time,” Jefferson adds. “I never want to write about bad guys and good guys. I want to write (about) human beings. And I think that’s always what’s the most interesting stuff. …
“You know people make bad decisions all the time, but it’s not because they’re bad people.”
“American Fiction” finds its truth in that belief system, reminding us that we all make mistakes.
