Director: Cord Jefferson
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Sterling K. Brown
Have I Seen it Before: No, but by a strange quirk of the world I managed to see it twice before getting around to writing my review.
Did I Like It: There’s a moment of hesitation to offer anything either in praise or criticism of a movie like this. Even admitting that much runs the risk of not getting the point. I’ll accept any of those judgments. I understand that when it comes to a movie like this, I’m a guest. I’ll try to comport myself as such, if for no other reason than to act otherwise would be to surrender to being the butt of this particular joke. I may not be able to avoid it entirely, but it is worth trying.
The film is one of the best comedy/dramas I’ve seen in a long time. The laughs connect almost invariably. All of the satire may not hit everyone on a single viewing. There were certainly parts I laughed much harder at on repeat. The real relationships between these characters—frequently flawed and often unable to reach any kind of catharsis—feels real and lived in. Nearly every one of the characters is at time infuriating—at least those in the actual Ellison family—but never unsympathetic.
Wright—always terrific—is a revelation here, a torrent of frustration that is always trying to understand something (several somethings, actually) that brings him great pain. Brown—although I might have found his recent performance in Biosphere (2022) a bit more fully realized—is a perfect counterpoint to Wright. Where Monk is damaged, Cliff is brazen. Where Monk is self-assured, Brown plays Cliff like an injured animal. I’d almost forgive some idea-bereft fool (maybe even Wiley (Adam Brody)) for putting these two together in a buddy cop film at one point.
My only point of contention with the film is that for all of its brilliance, the turn where Monk’s secret anonymous novel ends up as one of the books considered for the literary award he has found himself judging feels so telegraphed as to almost feel perfunctory. Thankfully, for all the time the film ramps up to that moment, it doesn’t bother to dwell on how things escalated to this borderline-sitcom turn, and return quickly to the pristine satire it had offered before and after.