Awards Season is traditionally the one stretch in the cinematic calendar when pro critics and Hollywood publicists are allowed to aggressively promote Serious Art instead of Tentpole IP. Neither the rush to crank out Best of the Year lists before competing publications nor the wine-and-dine FYC Industry parties that secure Oscar nominations are the most dignified way of highlighting what’s new & great in cinema, but it’s the system we’ve got to work with, and I appreciate the rhythm of the ritual. One of the sure-sign markers that we are deep in Awards Season territory right now is that distributors & publicists are starting to screen movies (the lowest of low-brow artforms) about literature (the highest of high-brow subjects). Anytime an academically minded movie about the morals, politics, and commerce of literature breaks out of the festival circuit to earn theatrical distribution in the final month of the year, you can be sure that it’s being positioned as a serious Awards Contender worthy of critical & industrial accolades. What’s fun about the two high-profile literary titles that recently hit my FYC inbox is that they’re not well-behaved, agreeable participators in that tradition. They’re both political provocations determined to shake up the literary status quo – too thorny to truly be considered Awards Bait crowd-pleasers, to their credit.
The major contender in this pairing is the publishing-world satire American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated English professor who writes a deliberately shitty, racist novel to parody the worst trends of the industry that regularly rejects his pitches, only to be horrified when it’s a runaway success. The film isn’t exactly Bamboozled-level confrontational in its satire of what white audiences want from Black art, but it isn’t far off, giving its fake in-movie novels titles like My Pafology and We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. The movie is often very funny as a cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house. More importantly, it might finally be the Jeffrey Wright showcase that graduates him from That Guy character actor to household name (the NPR household, at least). He’s given plenty of space to rattle off humorist dialogue as a fast-talking catty academic, and there’s a surprising amount of sincere domestic drama that fills the space between his satirist jokes. Maybe too much. American Fiction commits the most common sin of adapting a novel to the screen (in this case Erasure by Percival Everett), in that it’s willing to feel busy & overstuffed instead of editing out characters & plot events for a more streamlined narrative. The upside of that approach is that Wright is given room to interact with other greatly talented Black actors like Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Keith David, and Sterling K. Brown, each of whom play characters as complicated as his grumpy cynic protagonist. It’s a funny satire about the grotesque commercialization of “The African American Experience” in modern media, but it’s also just an emotionally satisfying family drama with an excellent cast.
The other literary provocation making the rounds right now is the trans-rights essay film Orlando, My Political Biography, in which philosopher-turned-filmmaker Paul B. Preciado praises & confronts the literary genius of Virginia Woolf. In particular, Preciado stages a conceptually shaky rebuttal to Woolf’s novel Orlando, taking it to task for not holding up to the scrutiny of modern gender & class politics (while also effusively praising it as an artistic triumph with profound personal insight into his own life). Dozens of trans & nonbinary performers announce themselves in the film as a living continuation of the Orlando character, who “changes sex” while asleep halfway into Woolf’s novel. They mix readings from the text with personal accounts of their own lives in the current political push for trans rights, often with Preciado’s narration pushing back on Woolf for making transitioning sound so magically easy & carefree. The performative artifice of the project reminds me a lot of the communal therapy in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing or Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which create academic playgrounds for real people to work out their real feelings in false environments. Despite that playfulness in form, though, I just wasn’t fully convinced by My Political Biography‘s academic approach to literary representation, especially by the time it starts referring to famous trans women like Christine Jorgensen and Marsha P. Johnson as extensions of Orlando. Woolf’s fantastical novel evokes themes of gender fluidity that might still be applicable to the modern world in abstract terms, but the way this project demands that it concretely speaks for the individual experiences of all trans & nonbinary people gets decreasingly credible the further the metaphor is stretched.
Even if I wasn’t fully convinced by the academic rigor of Orlando, My Political Biography, I still appreciated its daringness as a political & literary provocation. The way it casually claims Virginia Woolf as “perhaps nonbinary” herself, proudly demonstrates hormone shots & top surgery scars as a form of “pharmacoliberation,” and bends every personal monologue from its contributors into an affront to “The Binary Empire” is admirably confrontational as political activism, even if it falls short elsewhere in marrying abstract concepts to individual experiences. There’s also some wonderfully playful anachronism in its attempts to graft Orlando the character onto the modern world, especially in early scenes where a nonbinary performer is modernizing Woolf’s text on a laptop while dressed in football pads & an Elizabethan collar. Likewise, American Fiction makes a few momentary missteps in its academic satire (particularly in its opening-scene parody of “safe space” campus culture), but it’s still admirable for being willing to throw punches in the first place. The movie directly grapples with its own participation in marketing Black stories to apologetic white audiences, culminating in an indecision on how best to conclude its narrative without creating the illusion that the issue of Race in the publishing industry has been resolved. Where it comes ahead as the better film in this pairing is that it manages to pose those kinds of grand political provocations without losing touch with the (fictional) individuals at its center, never speaking for an entire social class through a strict, prescriptive lens. In either case, though, I’m just happy there’s something out there to talk about other than the latest Marvel movie or Tom Cruise actioner; I almost feel like I’ve been reading books instead of mindlessly watching a screen.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 