It should be easy enough to look past the trepanning of Percival Everett’s Erasure into a bowdlerized, palatable awards season entertainment. Sure, writer-director Cord Jefferson stripped out the novel’s abortion rights subplot just before an election year. Yes, he rewrote Everett’s unsentimental plot beats into something befitting a Hallmark Movie of the Month, and shrunk the riotous My Pafology mini-novella into a single, unimaginative scene. He even allowed Sintara Golden, author of the repugnant We’s Lives In Da Ghetto, to seem like the reasonable one. The jokes are bad. The soundtrack blows. The film just…sort of ends? Not to mention how the whole thing looks like it was shot on a first-gen iPad. (And the portions are small.) Yet books are not movies, though sometimes they’re both awful.
One even forgives the tremendously undeserved Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, because they hand out bullshit Oscars almost all the time. But something odious happened when, rather than sincerely thank Everett or the actors or his family, Jefferson used his acceptance speech to applaud himself for no longer being “vindictive,” before launching into a made-for-virality jeremiad about how the industry should make more movies like his. Listen, Jefferson has had one of those truly blessed writing careers, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I just would have assumed the millions of dollars and awards show fêtings might ameliorate whatever private slights he’s incurred along the way, but apparently there’s no victory that will sate the bloodlust of a sore winner. If you brag, out loud, at the Oscars, after winning an Oscar, about how you’re no longer fueled by vengeance — well, pardon the skepticism.
You shudder to think of the media class narcissists watching all this and thinking, That could be me. Please, put the screenplays back in the drawer and get over yourself. —Michael Manners
this is a thing of beauty and as a literary agent I'm just bummed it's anonymous
I should have read the book before I saw the movie.