Producers: Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios, Cord Jefferson and Jermaine Johnson   Director: Cord Jefferson   Screenplay: Cord Jefferson and Percival Everett   Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, Adam Brody, Keith David, Okieriete Onaodowan, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Raymond Anthony Thomas, Miriam Shor, J.C. MacKenzie, Patrick Fischler, John Ales, Michael Cyril Creighton, Neal Lerner, Jenn Harris, Bates Wilder and Ryan Richard Doyle  Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Grade: B

After toiling in television writing rooms for a decade, Cord Jefferson attempts a difficult balancing act in his first feature, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” for which the author himself collaborated on the script and Jefferson took on directing duties for the first time.  At once a satire of liberal white America’s stereotyping of the black experience and a domestic drama about the reality of that experience, “American Fiction” doesn’t manage to juggle its disparate plotlines effortlessly, and is a mite too genteel in tone for its own good, but overall it proves a winning debut.

Much of the success is attributable to a skillfully modulated, laid-back performance by Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an author and academic who runs into trouble with the English faculty at the college after he confronts a white student in his class who claims to be offended by his writing the title of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Artificial Nigger” on the board.  At a departmental meeting where he trades insults with a hostile colleague (Patrick Fischler) while the wimpy chair (John Ales) tries to maintain order, the defensive Monk is told that he’s being put on leave.

His first order of business is to attend a conference where he encounters Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who’s being feted for her novel “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” which strikes him as an example of the sort of “black literature” that’s embraced by the supposed literati as truthful and incisive but he sees as condescending and unrepresentative of the variety of African-American experience—like his own upper-middle-class upbringing.  In his frustration at having his latest novel rejected by his publisher for not being “black” enough, he pens a parody of the drugs-and-gangsta genre that he calls “My Pafology” and ascribes to one Stagg R. Leigh (as he writes, Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan appear in his imagination as the warring father-son duo in the book).  He insists that his genial agent Arthur (the engaging John Ortiz) submit it to publishers, assuming that it will be recognized as a joke.

It isn’t.  A firm offers big bucks for the publishing rights, and its chief representative (Miriam Shor) and marketing head (Michael Cyril Creighton) enthuse over its “honesty”—and its potential profits.  When they insist on meeting Leigh, Arthur, himself anxious for success, persuades Monk to impersonate Leigh, explaining that he can only do so via Zoom, because he’s a wanted fugitive and when a hot Hollywood producer-director appropriately named Wiley (Adam Brody) buys the movie rights and wants to meet the author personally, he has to carry the impersonation further, into a restaurant.  (The publisher reps indicate that Michael B. Jordan is interested in starring, and suggest that they might do a movie tie-in cover with the actor wearing, as Monk looks on incredulously, a durag.)

The satire is extended as Monk is asked by Carl Brunt (J.C. MacKenzie), the head of a New England book award program that’s been criticized for its lack of diversity, to join the jury that will choose the year’s winner.  He’ll join Sintara and three others—Wilson (Neal Lerner), Ailene (Jenn Harris) and Daniel (Bates Wilder), all white—on the panel, and is astonished when his own parody book, now retitled (at his own suggestion) “Fuck,” is submitted.  He and Sintara are outvoted to give it the prize: they find it pandering and phony, while the others acclaim it as gritty and piercingly real.  That leads to the award ceremony where Monk must decide whether to reveal the truth, and to a finale on a Hollywood sound stage where he and Wiley argue over how the movie should end. 

What’s remarkable about all this is that one might expect all this to be presented in an edgy, angry way, but it isn’t.  Jefferson, Wright and the others bring out the humor, but in a remarkably gentle, even generous fashion; the publishing reps, white jury members and even Wiley are presented as obtuse and even fatuous, but they’re not mean-spirited, merely smugly misguided.  And Monk himself is depicted as flawed himself, not only in the way he sees himself (he berates a hapless bookstore clerk played by Richard Ryan Doyle for putting his novels in a section titled “African-American Voices” rather than the “Fiction” shelves, and must admit his misjudgment of Sintara) but especially in his relationships with his family.

That constitutes the second portion of “American Fiction,” in which Monk reconnects with his Boston roots.  After years of distancing himself, he returns to find his divorced sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), a doctor, struggling to care for their widowed mother Agnes (Leslie Ellison), who’s showing signs of increasing dementia.  Death intervenes, which brings the return of their brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown), divorced after announcing that he’s gay—something Lisa has refused to accept.  And room is found for other subplots—the revelation of a family secret regarding Monk’s deceased father; Monk’s romance with Coraline (Erika Alexander), a lawyer with whom he sometimes disagrees; another between the family’s longtime housekeeper Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) and Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas), a gregarious cop.  This section of the film dovetails with the satirical one—Monk’s going along with the farcical reaction to his book is tied to his need for the money to pay for Agnes’ medical treatment—but more fundamentally it’s designed to show how his domestic reality doesn’t fit the common portrayal of African-American life in the entertainment media.

Of course, blending the two parts of the film requires a delicate touch, and Jefferson doesn’t prove himself entirely deft in the task.  There are points where the conjunctions are a bit off, where the pacing is somewhat off, where the tone isn’t quite on target.

Yet the failings are minor beside the general success of the whole.  With Wright leading the way, the cast is solid across the board, even minor characters coming across strongly.  And while the film won’t win any technical awards, the production design (Jonathan Guggenheim), costumes (Rudy Mance), cinematography (Cristina Dunlop) and editing (Hilda Rasula) are all more than competent.  Laura Karpman’s score doesn’t always feel as finely judged as it might be, and is occasionally just too obtrusive, but it’s not a terrible flaw.

One can imagine a Spike Lee taking on this material with ferocity, but that’s not Jefferson’s way.  In its calmer, more reflective, more good-natured way, “American Fiction” makes its points in a package more comfortable than aggressive.  You might not agree with that choice, but it mostly works.

Producers: Michael Mann, P.J. van Sandwijk, Marie Savare, John Lesher, Thomas Hayslip, John Friedberg, Laura Rister, Andrea Iervolino, Monika Bacardi, Gareth West, Lars Sylvest and Thorsten Schumacher   Director: Michael Mann   Screenplay: Troy Kennedy Martin   Cast: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey, Daniela Piperno, Michele Savoia, Ben Collins, Andrea Dolente, Giuseppe Bonifati, Marino Franchitti, Valentina Bellè, Benedetto Benedettini and Tommaso Basili   Distributor: Neon

Grade: B

Michael Mann’s biographical film about Enzo Ferrari is sleek and slick, with images casting a metallic gleam to bewitch the eye, like the vehicles from his fabled company that circle today’s tracks at astonishing speeds.  But you won’t find any such cars in “Ferrari,” because though the script by Troy Kennedy Martin is based on Brock Yates’s 1992 cradle-to-grave book “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Car, The Races, The Machine,” it focuses, apart from a few flashbacks, on a sliver of his life—specifically the year 1957, when he faced personal and professional crises.  Mann uses these months to paint a portrait of the man as a domineering figure who tried to control both himself and everything around him, with, of course, only variable success.

A barely recognizable Adam Driver captures the stern, implacable exterior of Ferrari as his marriage, to the volcanic Laura (Penélope Cruz), is disintegrating after the death of their beloved son Dino (Benedetto Benedettini), whom we see in some of the film’s few flashbacks.  Enzo’s severe, opinionated mother Adalgisa (Daniela Piperno) hardly helps matters.  Nor does the fact that Enzo is far happier with his long-time mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), with whom he has another son, Piero (Giuseppe Festinese), whom Lina is anxious for him to acknowledge with his name before his upcoming confirmation.

Ferrari’s business is also in a precarious state, on the verge of bankruptcy, and attempts to secure outside financing are complicated by the fact that he shares ownership with Laura, who’s tired of his philandering and threatens simply to liquidate her share.  It becomes imperative for him to field cars—and drivers—that will win the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile endurance race through northern Italy.  In fact one of his entries—a Ferrari 315 S driven by Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey)—does come in first. 

But the victory is marred by tragedy.  A tire on another Ferrari car, a 335 S driven by Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), with Edmund Nelson (Eri Haugen) as navigator, explodes and the car veers out of control into a crowd of spectators at Guidizollo, killing Portago, Nelson and nine onlookers, five of them children.  Yet the business survives despite the public blowback.

Screenwriter Martin and the veteran director, making his first film in eight years, cover this period in Ferrari’s life, an annus both mirabilis and horribilis for him, with something very near brilliance.  After a brief prologue in which Driver is almost comically inserted into archival racing footage to show us the young Enzo speeding down the track during his years as a driver for Alfa Romeo, the actor reappears as the fifty-nine-year old automotive mogul known to his employees as the Commendatore, a man respected for his command of detail and feared for his demands for perfection.  Grey-haired and ramrod straight, he loosens up only when spending time with Lina and Piero, or when attending mass or the opera.

His conversations wife his wife are marked by her bitter recriminations, and when they visit Dino’s grave in the family crypt, they do so separately.  His relations with the public are no more cordial: he considers the press vipers, and responds to criticism of his cars’ race losses with sarcastic condescension.  But as a businessman, he jockeys imperiously between selling high-performance vehicles to elite patrons, courting possible investors, and overseeing final touches to the cars and decisions about the driving team for the Mille Miglia.  The mood is tense, as a recent test run had resulted in a crash in which Eugenio Castellotti (Marino Franchitti), one of his drivers, died.

Ferrari, in fact, is obsessed with thoughts of death—not only the loss of his son and Castellotti, but memories of old track comrades killed decades earlier.  Yet he’s philosophical about the dangers in his business: when his mother suggests that he feels guilty about Castellotti’s death, he suggests curtly that the guilty party was really the dead driver’s mother, whose insistence that her son marry a high-born girl (Valentina Bellè) undermined his concentration.  And arguing with Laura, he insists that he did everything he could to slow the progress of the disease that took their son at only twenty-four.

The final act of the film is devoted to the Mille Miglia, with exciting reenactments of the race, the bullet-like vehicles speeding through villages down Alpine roads, interspersed with Ferrari’s reaction as he follows his cars’ progress and issues orders to the drivers and the support team.  It culminates, of course, in Taruffi’s victory, which is obscured by the horror of the crash.

Mann stages the tragedy in a masterly fashion, with the literal flight of the airborne car into the crowd followed by a painful tracking shot of the victims, the grotesque detail, including De Portago’s severed corpse, only partially obscured by tricks of light and shadow in Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography, in which here as elsewhere shades of grey dominate.  That’s also true of Maria Djurkovic’s production design and Massimo Cantini Parrini’s costumes, including Ferrari’s suits and sunglasses; the resultant images often look like black-and-white compositions only gently touched with color, except in the outdoor daylight race scenes, with their brightly-colored cars and pristine vistas.

The film ends with the aftermath of the race, in which Ferrari has to deal with the public outcry over the crash, the beginnings of an investigation into the cause, and the potential effect upon his company—with possible collapse averted by an accommodation with Laura.

Driver dominates the film, capturing the steely resolve Ferrari exudes in public, tempered by his affectionate behavior toward Lina and, especially, Piero; it’s a remarkably controlled performance, actually quite showy but in an understated way that conceals the histrionic quality.  By contrast Cruz is a furious force of nature, until at the close she proves even more determined than her husband to do everything necessary to save the firm they’d jointly founded a decade earlier.  Everyone else, including Woodley, is distinctly secondary, but Piperno makes a memorably stereotypical Italian mama, and Dempsey, as Taruffi, like Driver buries his familiar persona in the role.

Edited with skill by Pietro Scalia, who brings a combination of stateliness and edginess to the expository material as well as the racing sequences, and boasting an aural backdrop—with a strikingly razor-sharp score by Daniel Pemberton that combines well with a sound design by Lee Orloff that becomes an ominous roar in the racing sequences—Mann’s film as is much a technical marvel as the cars Ferrari produced.

But it’s also, like the man it depicts, austere, analytical and, in the end, deeply opaque.  “Ferrari” engages the brain without ever touching the heart.