You are so right about this movie! I caught the very last local theater screening last night, and was super impressed. What an “actor’s movie”, and what stellar performances from the actors!
Yes, it was a bit sentimental in spots IMHO, but that’s okay in a family drama. Yes, there was a certain amount of exaggerated caricature of the views it was lampooning, but that’s okay in a social satire.
The one thing I wish the movie had done more of was to lean a bit harder on the protagonist’s contempt for his own “totally crap novel”. I kept waiting for one of the other characters to say something about some more nuanced aspect of the book that causes Monk (the protagonist) to stop short and silently realize that oh shit, maybe he did accidentally do some quality writing in this piece of cynical trash whose subject and style and prurient sensationalism he thoroughly despises.
It was such a fun and thought-provoking premise for a movie, but I think it could have been even more so if it hadn’t remained so, er, black-and-white (or maybe red-and-blue, as in the Johnny Walker metaphor?) about a straightforward binary distinction between good books and trashy books.
I think it would have been really cool if the movie had probed deeper into the ways that skillful writing and manipulative trashiness interact, and how such interactions can contribute to the “smash hit” phenomenon. I mean, I think there has to be a reason why a lot of thoughtful readers, including the protagonist’s own girlfriend Coraline, liked the book despite its deliberate trashiness, and without knowing that Monk was the author.
And the reason can’t be merely “all the liberal-guilt white intellectuals are falling for this fake Black poverty-porn parody because they think it’s so ‘authentic’”, although that’s certainly a major factor. After all, Coraline, for example, isn’t white.
I came back from the theater and immediately bought the streaming version of American Fiction online, which tells you something about my expectations of finding it worth rewatching in the future.