Is Hollywood really tired of woke culture, of political correctness that is often just 'politically false'?
It really seems so if a very indie debut work (with a ridiculous budget) like American Fiction by Cord Jefferson.
A film a thousand miles away from Green Book, a feel-good comedy about the friendship between a white driver and a black pianist in the 1960s.
With the cry of 'let's put an end to stereotypes', 'enough identityism', this film tells a simple thing: the black bourgeoisie has no voice and the problems of many African Americans today are completely different, but they are not in fashion, in short they do not satisfy that racism disguised as approval that white people love so much.
This is precisely what happens to Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), the protagonist of American Fiction, a black literature professor and unlucky novelist because the novels he proposes to the publisher are considered not very 'black': that is, without absent fathers, rap, crack, swearing and people getting killed by bad white cops.
Thelonious, intelligent enough to bear his fate, however, misses his appointment with tolerance only when an African-American writer, even more bourgeois than him, publishes a clever novel which immediately becomes a success, riding on all the possible stereotypes and with a slang poor, all things that titillate white guilt.
So Thelonious, furious, invents a pseudonym and immediately writes a book of the same type with a very black title: Fuck.
And success, money and even a film adaptation arrive.
Among the most striking moments of American Fiction is when Thelonious is included in the jury of a literary prize ("a black person fits well on the jury") and finds himself judging the book he wrote under a pseudonym.
And the comedy?
Thanks to the skill of Jeffrey Wright, he is capable of subtle irony, as is the case with the entire cast: Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown (nominated for supporting actor in the role of Thelonious), John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody and Keith David.
Cult phrase from this film, freely adapted from the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, what Thelonious says about what white publishers want from black authors: "necessary books", 'open wounds', they are hungry for 'black trauma'".
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