3/11/2024 0 Comments Picture of life size rulerEverett’s Monk writes a parody that is overt and outrageous it features poor Black children bearing such names as Aspireene and Tylenola, and it also involves an obvious, extended antic adaptation of Richard Wright’s “ Native Son.” The parody in the film combines standard-issue macho violence and intentionally cheap sentiment. (He’s working on a novel about subjecting Roland Barthes to his own post-structuralist methods.) The Monk of Jefferson’s film is a tweedy humanist, a relatively traditional reader whose daily vocabulary isn’t chockablock with theory and arcana, whose outward difference from non-literary nonintellectuals isn’t quite so awkward and conspicuous. An intellectual obsessed with Continental philosophy and literary theory, he makes cerebral asides in French and Latin, and prizes literary gamesmanship. The Monk of Everett’s novel is a complicated person. Meanwhile, Monk, the son of educated, upper-middle-class professionals, is involved in family issues and romantic troubles that represent exactly the kind of Black lives that, the movie suggests, publishers (and filmmakers) ignore. Lo and behold, it’s bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sold to Hollywood for millions, and nominated for a major literary award. When Monk learns that an Oberlin-educated Black woman with a publishing background has written a best-seller that, to his mind, merely perpetuates noxious stereotypes, he adopts a “ghetto” literary persona and writes a parody in the same vein. The movie, like the book, tells the story of a Black writer and college professor named Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), nicknamed Monk, who is having trouble getting his latest novel published, because it’s based on Aeschylus’ “The Persians” and not on what editors consider the Black American experience. And, unfortunately, Jefferson’s other changes mostly strip out what makes the book a fascinating and complex portrait of a writer in crisis-namely, voice. It’s an inspired change, but there’s also something self-justifying about it, as if the filmmaker is giving himself carte blanche for all the other changes he makes to the source material. It wouldn’t be fair to reveal it, except to say that it explicitly emphasizes the difference between a movie and a novel-or, rather, what’s needed to make a filmed adaptation a success. Near the end of this adaptation of Percival Everett’s dazzlingly polyphonic 2001 novel “ Erasure,” the writer and director Cord Jefferson introduces a deft metafictional twist of his own. Now, however, the fact that they are in the running for a major prize stokes responses, too, and prompts me to clarify why I wouldn’t have put any of the three in my own list of the year’s best movies. I’ve already reviewed seven of the ten Best Picture nominees: “ Anatomy of a Fall,” “ Barbie,” “ The Holdovers,” “ Killers of the Flower Moon,” “ Maestro,” “ Oppenheimer,” and “ The Zone of Interest.” The remaining three, all of which I first saw months ago, are far from inconsequential, but others stoked stronger responses at the time. But then come the Oscar nominations, which give movies instant prominence, thus creating journalistic necessities of their own. Many of them will vanish without leaving much of an artistic trace, or even a cultural one-defining “cultural” here as everything in the arts that gets talked about other than aesthetics. Generally, it feels better to share the former than the latter, and toward the end of each year, when distributors display the wares they’re proudest of for awards season, there’s no shortage of good movies to enthuse about, so I’m more inclined to pick and choose among the lesser ones. Paul Valéry wrote that taste is made of a thousand distastes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |