A black American author defies racial stereotypes to write literary novels based on classic works. They’re good, with complex characters, but they won’t sell and his latest (a rewrite of Xenophon’s The Persians) can’t even get published. Infuriated by a fellow black author's success with a book that seems to pander to white preconceptions of black life, and in financial straits, he decides to dumb down and write a best-seller, under a pseudonym, which reiterates the cliches and tropes about black Americans. Inevitably this is a soaraway success, not only in terms of sales but also in terms of critical acclaim.
I suppose it was intended to be hard-hitting satire but it was heavy-hitting instead, employing the sledgehammer rather than the rapier. For example, three white judges overrule the two black judges when deciding that the pseudonymous book should win a literary prize and, just so the viewers get the point, one of the white judges claims that this is because they need to listen to the black voice. And then, just to make doubly sure that the viewers get the point, the camera lingers on a shot of the white judges on one side of the table and the black judges on the other. Which slightly makes the point that this film is itself dumbing down.
Perhaps the intent is that the satire resides in the format of the film itself. Metacinematic techniques, such as showing the characters in the book fighting while the author types, are used. It could be argued that the argument at the end in which a white fictional film producer rejects the author’s preference for two possible endings on the grounds of ambiguity and opts for the author being slaughtered in a hail of bullets thanks to an overzealous and fundamentally misjudged police response is itself the message of the film (this idea seems to have been nicked fro the author-appearing alternative endings in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles). But that hammers home (sorry) my point about the satire being unsubtle in the extreme.
The dumbed-down lightweight entertainment has been nominated for five Oscars including those for best picture and best adapted screenplay (winning this one). I presume that the awards are for what it says rather than for how it says it, which is the very thing that the film’s theme is supposedly attacking. I conclude that the critics didn’t get the joke.
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