To continue going down the Oscar nominated (and winning) pictures, I decided to watch American Fiction. I saw a trailer for this during my showing of Exorcist Believer and I laughed so hard at the story. I thought it would be a light hearted comedy, but it was surprisingly emotional as well. The story follows a writer named Monk who is tired of books being written about 'African-American struggles' when they are riddled with stereotypes and tropes hurting his community. To prove a point, the struggling author decides to write under a pen name an outlandish book with extremely harmful stereotypes to 'prove a point'. The book ends up being a success, and now Monk has to figure out how to deal with this secret fame by either selling this trope-ridden book of his or to call it all off. Let me say, this movie was hilarious! The scenes of Monk writing this book and the opening shot of the other author reading her 'African-American' book was really funny and my brother and I could not stop laughing. I was not prepared for how serious this movie was as it dealt with death, drug addiction, and gay acceptance, but all of these scenes were balanced in between comedic moments so that nothing felt too overwhelming. The character development in this film was really good, and the dialogue was not cliche and felt refreshing and original. The acting was great too, and this made the emotional scenes very impactful. I also felt like this movie was not similar to anything else I've seen before, since it was very comedic at times but also had deep messages about stereotypes and how they hurt our society despite the societal outcomes, and I am definitely going to look for more films similar to this one! Overall, I highly recommend this film to anyone wanting laughs, but be prepared for some heavy topics.
