race

AMERICAN FICTION: this can’t be happening

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Photo caption: Jeffrey Wright in AMERICAN FICTION. Courtesy of MGM.

In the sharply funny American Fiction, Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is an academic and a novelist, the kind who wins literary awards, not the kind who people read on the airplane or on the beach. He is also African-American, named Thelonious Monk Ellison at birth, and his father and both siblings are physicians. His literary agent (John Ortiz) has not found a publisher ready to buy Monk’s latest high-falutin manuscript, an updating of Aeschylus.

Monk’s sensibilities are offended whenever he is pigeon-holed as a Black Writer. But he is enraged by books and movies that portray everyday African-American life as driven by deadbeat dads, crack addicts, and getting shot by the police. Monk, himself financially stressed by circumstance, goes ballistic when a Black writer (Issa Rae) gets a best seller by penning a story crammed with negative tropes.

Monk, in his cups, goes all in, adopting the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, and cramming every offensive stereotype into a volume initially titled My Pafology (until it gets an even worse new title). Monk demands that his agent submit it to publishers, and they are shocked when publishing houses and movie studios vie over the rights.

The joke here is that, far from ignoring black voices, the New York and Hollywood cultural gate-keepers, not a Trump voter among them, are eager to embrace black artists and black content – as long as the work conforms to the stereotypes with which they are comfortable. American Fiction sends up the white intelligentsia for incentivizing black creatives to perform in a new, but equally disgusting, form of black face. It’s wickedly funny.

While American Fiction is a successful social parody, it includes heartfelt threads of family dynamics and personal self-discovery. (There’s even a wedding.)

Jeffrey Wright is wonderful as a Monk who is pompous and curmudgeonly when we first meet him, but who becomes more complicated as we learn more about his upbringing. Tracee Ellis Ross (Blackish), Sterling K. Brown and Erika Alexander are each remarkably winning as Monk’s siblings and love interest, respectively. Leslie Uggams is downright brilliant as Monk’s mother. The entire cast is excellent, including the actors playing powerful white nitwits, especially Miriam Shor and Adam Brody

American Fiction is the directorial debut of its screenwriter, Cord Jefferson, who won a Primetime Emmy for Watchmen. It is a brilliant screenplay; Jefferson adapted it from the book Erasure by Percival Everett.

American Fiction is nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Jefferson’s screenplay, Laura Karpman’s score, Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are also Oscar-nominated. This is one of my Best Movies of 2023.

PASSING: navigating a racist society and the value of one’s identity

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Photo caption: Negga and Tessa Thompson in PASSING. Courtesy of Netflix.

Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in Rebecca Hall’s thought-provoking drama Passing, about the value of one’s identity and navigating in a racist society. It’s 1920s New York City and two light-skinned black women, both prosperous wives and mothers, happen upon each other for the first time since childhood. Irene (Tessa Thompson) is married to a doctor and has become a figure in Harlem society. Irene is shocked to find Clare (Ruth Negga) with her hair died platinum blonde and passing as Caucasian – even married to a racist white man.

For Irene, the reunion is unsettling because, ever polite, she doesn’t want to express her own disapproval of “passing”. Things get nerve-wracking for Irene when Clare’s husband (Alexander Skarsgård) shows up; from his very first word (which is overtly racist), it’s clear that things will go badly for Clare if he discovers her actual race. Presumably, he knows that Clare is not a real blonde, but he is SO racist that he even assumes that Irene must be white.

Clare on other hand, is eager to rekindle their friendship, regardless of the risks that Irene calculates. Clare NEEDS to slip a toe back into African-American culture. She is oblivious to Irene’s disgust for “passing”, and, when they first encounter in an elegant hotel tea room, Clare even assumes at first that Irene is passing.

Despite Irene’s reluctance, Clare composes herself in Irene’s family and social circle. We watch Irene as she runs her staid household (with black servants). She puts on a swinging charity benefit, attended by her black upper crust peers and by hip white New Yorkers sampling Harlem culture. One of the latter is Irene’s friend Wentworth (Bill Camp), a literary figure of standing.

Despite her charity leadership (for the Negro Welfare League), she wants to “protect” her sons from the “race issue” by keeping them sheltered and ignorant.  Her husband Brian (André Holland) doesn’t agree – he has given up on improving race relations in America and wants to relocate the family in another country.

Is anyone here satisfied? Irene keeps saying she is satisfied, meaning personally, but she does her charity work for a reason. Brian is exhausted by his practice and wants to give up on the entire nation. Clare is comfortable having made a choice that she describes in the most materialistic terms, but is still yearning for what she misses in White society.

Referring to the 1929 novel, Mick LaSalle writes,

“…it’s a great advantage that the movie’s source is in the past. If this story were attempted today, it would be about a social issue. One woman would be presented as right, and the other would be wrong. There would be a crucial realization three-quarters in, and then a moral to the story spelled out before the closing credits.“

Passing is directed by British actress Rebecca Hall, whose own American mother is multiracial. As a director, Hall puts her actors in the forefront, framing them in static shots and with piano music just jazzy enough to suggest Harlem setting. Passing is photographed in black and white, with the backgrounds washed out to emphasize the characters in the foreground (and the colors of their skin).

The performances are excellent. Negga has the showier role as the charming, flamboyant and dangerously flighty Clare. Thompson’s Irene is really the more important character, and Thompson lets us see inside this woman who is so very proper that she should be boring; but Thompson’s Irene is ever thoughtful, introspective and contained – with all her turmoil roiling inside. 

Veteran character actor Camp is exceptional as Wentworth, the sardonic white novelist who enjoys his forays into Harlem and values his friendship with Irene. An actor who can make the smallest role memorable, Camp has recently played Mr. Shaibel, the chess-teaching school janitor in The Queen’s Gambit and The Beach Boys’ controlling father in Love & Mercy.

Passing is still in some theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.

THE NEUTRAL GROUND: the supremacist legacy of old statues

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Photo caption: C.J. Hunt in NEUTRAL GROUND. Photo courtesy of PBS POV.

In the pointed documentary The Neutral Ground, C.J. Hunt explores the continuing legacy of Confederate monuments in America. Finding the backlash against removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments so absurd, Hunt, a producer for The Daily Show, started out to make a snarky YouTube video. But he found himself drawn more deeply into the history of Confederate monuments, so intentionally braided with white supremacy.

In my view (and C.J. Hunt’s), it’s a no-brainer to remove monuments that should never have been erected in the first place. After all, these monuments celebrate men who led a traitorous insurrection against their own country, who sought to keep other human beings enslaved and who lost a disastrous war. Traitors. Slavers. Losers.

But Hunt is fascinated by the chorus of White Southerners advocating for the preservation of Confederate monuments to maintain pride in (White) Southern heritage. All of them claim that the Civil War was not about slavery. And none of them would say that they are White supremacists or that slavery was acceptable. Hunt notes a disconnect with historical fact:

“The founding documents of the Confederacy talk so obsessively about slavery, the real mystery is how so many people came to believe that Confederate symbols have nothing to do with it.”

I am a student of American history, and this is one of my pet peeves. If you’re interested, you can read more thoughts about THE NEUTRAL GROUND and the Lost Cause lie.

Now back to the movie, The Neutral Ground.

Hunt is very funny. To a woman who wants to keep all the statues in their prominent places with plaques for context, he suggests this wording: “Hi, I’m Robert E. Lee. A long time ago, I turned on my country and led over 200,000 Southern sons to their graves, so we could keep our basic right to own human beings as property. #SorryI’mNotSorry“.

After meeting a round of genteel “as long as you stay in your place” racists, Hunt is unnerved by encounters with the “I want to kill you” variety of racists.

For me, the highlights of The Neutral Ground were Hunt’s sparring with his own African-American father. His dad, moving about his kitchen in an Aunt Jemima apron, critically recounts the evolution of C.J.’s own racial awareness and imparts his own unblinking view of institutional racism in America. This repartee sets the stage for The Neutral Ground to become even more personally-focused for C.J. Hunt.

I watched The Neutral Ground on PBS’ POV; it’s now streaming on PBS.