Tis Me Michelle

Have you heard of AMC’s Screen Unscreen? Well I hadn’t until the other week I got an e-mail about it. I love the concept. Basically you get a discounted ticket to watch a preview of a movie. They give you the movie rating (R, PG-13, etc) and that’s about all you get. I was curious, so I gave it a go! Apparently there’s a Scream Unscreen as well, I will never be attending that.

As you can tell from the title, it ended up being American Fiction. I just so happened to watch a trailer for this a couple weeks before, so as soon as it started I knew what it was. And I was delighted. The trailer looked interesting. I don’t know that I would have gone out of my way to see this in theaters otherwise, but I’m glad it was the mystery movie of the night.

The movie directed by Cord Jefferson was based on a book, Erasure by Percival Everett. I of course had not heard of it. If it’s anything like the movie, I’m sure it was great! We follow Dr. Thelonious Ellison aka Monk, who is a writer and professor, or at least was a professor. He hasn’t found much success in his writing career and as he is working on his latest novel he stumbles on a book getting critical acclaim and selling big time. A book he finds is feeding white people a version of the Black experience that is exploiting. As a joke he writes his own version of a book that he finds simple and demeaning to the Black experience. And to no surprise to us, but complete shock to Monk and his editor Arthur, the book becomes a hit. He then has to go about pretending to be a made up version of what he thinks the backers are looking for meanwhile being irritated that people are actually eating it up.

There’s also a layer of family that’s rather interesting and adds to the movie. Everyone in the family is a doctor, so there is clearly a level of prestige. And yet you can tell each of the children in some form feels like they haven’t quite lived up to who they want to be in their own ways. The casting in this movie was fantastic. I’ve seen Jeffrey Wright in a few things here and there, but the first time in a lead role and I have to say he was fantastic. He is able to play the misunderstood grumpy writer as well as a sweet boy who treats his mother and their housekeeper Lorraine with so much love and admiration.

Aside from him, I was so happy to see Erika Alexander who we should all love and remember as Maxine from Living Single. And Sterling K. Brown was so fun and complex in this movie. There were so many sub-storylines I would have been more than willing to go down, especially his. A glimpse of life when their father was around would have been interesting. At the same time I didn’t feel like there was anything missing, you know? There was enough in the movie to give us what we needed to know about their pasts and current situations.

On a completely separate note, I was intrigued by the audience I watched the movie with. As I mentioned, I would probably have waited to watch this movie once it came out on streaming. But I would also be curious what the audience of the movie would be had we known what the movie was. The majority of the audience I was with was white. And from my viewing experience it was clear that they found the white characters to be very satirical. As a person of color who has experienced interesting encounters, watching this movie was a meta experience in it of itself.

I thought the movie was fantastic. And if you want a well-balanced watch, this is a great choice. It deals with heavy family matters, race, class, all while being rather wholesome and humorous. Check this one out!

Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️