01/13/2024
Film Review 🎥
(American Fiction )
First off the film only played for the opening release night (which I missed) and it finally came to theaters this weekend locally….
What a remarkable journey of characters and humanity. What has been captured here in art and film is truly truly something. The age old query of "what is the purpose of life" is somehow explained by "live life and see what happens".
What kind of answer is that, well, it's an answer...somehow somewhat this is how this film answers that so eloquently.
The Cinematography by Cristina Dunlap is an ocean of clarity as She plays up the organic spaces,
in outlining and confining intricate streams of interpersonal friendships, families...
in drama-trauma university labs,
and wistfully upon lonely dunes and fretful beaches with salty winds sweeping over low steel blue tides.
There are desperate tantrums in, out, and around cramped cars along with "professional tic tac toe" kerfuffles in book stores, even frantic speaker phone calls to power lunch pitches and deals.
This film sparkles with kaleidescopic coloring and charisma,
the see-thru glass of each human - crystalline personalities - that are so emotionally delicate, so transparently shown while their lives whiz by,
subservient and bounded to the relentless ticking of time.
In so many split seconds decisions, the stars and planets collide and their whole futures are altered unexpectedly.
Then
All of those personal moments are contrasted against the underlying overall "interesting conversation and argument" theme:
Is there is marketing space for artists to freely create and sell what they want to a specific audience who wants to buy those artifacts in those genres... regardless of culture, stereotypes or expectations? A very valid perspective.
Director Writer Cord Jefferson (Based on book: Erasure by Percival Everett)
brings a effervescence of pure life as one can live it.
He cradles so many important issues,
touching upon the tenderness and harshness of middle age and quite profoundly primary care for seniors.
He brings us all to an emotion understanding how fragile life is, feelings are, actions can be.
In a moment's wisp the heaviest of issues dematerialize right before our very eyes everything or everyone all at once, gone...just gone like that!
like the sand being pulled from under our feet by a retreating tide.
We laugh, we cry, and we laugh even harder. It seems to say...
If you don't live "your life" you don't live your life.
You become a victim of not choosing you.
This is a very bittersweet Shakespearean tragedy-comedy. The questions and its answers are contrary and unexpected, just the way life unfolds. How many of us expected our lives to be as they are now as we once thought, dreamed, projected, and realized.
We move so certainly and uncertainly in an unpredictable and predictable world.
American Fiction brings that sword's edge to life with fun and sadness.
Finally, make no mistake this is wonderful in its laughter and pro-humanness and should not be missed. It's a grand carousel in an equally grand carnival called life.
4.8/5 There is no such thing as a perfect film but honestly this is one of the best I’ve seen in a very long time.