I was worried that this would be a "grumpy guy learns the error of his ways" type movie. I was hoping for something like Krippendorf's Tribe with a pessimistic edge. What we got was somewhere in the middle. The satire was on point, if a little blunt. The humor hit about 60% of the time. The biggest issue I had was that this satire about a very specific topic kept devolving into a family drama, and the entire plot about the author and his false identity began to feel like an afterthought. In the end, nothing was really resolved. Jeffrey Wright is always excellent, and he was well suited to the role. It's just a shame it wasn't a more substantial movie, because when it was on the story about the false identity it was good. It just kept trying to become a different movie for some reason.
Review of American Fiction
