Nickel Boys (2024)
dir. RaMell Ross
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2024 Amazon MGM Studios
I wish I was more in love with director RaMell Ross’s striking and avant-garde stylistic vision for Nickel Boys. The director previously received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature for his similarly unconventional aesthetic in Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which focuses on the Black community in Hale County, Alabama. (While researching for this review, I discovered that Ross’s inspiration for that earlier film was Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi cycle of films. I had already heard excellent things about Hale County, but, as the Qatsi trilogy is one of my cinematic touchstones, I’m now more determined to catch up with Ross’s 2018 film.)
The daring visual choice at the heart of Nickel Boys hinges on perspective. The film’s point of view is literally that of the story’s two main characters, teenagers named Elwood and Turner. For the first hour of the picture, the camera shows us only what Elwood sees. When he then meets Turner at the reform school where Elwood’s been sent for the crime of getting into the wrong car, something completely unexpected happens. At the end of a scene where the two young men make conversation in the school’s commissary, the film cuts to an impressionistic collage of shots inside of a moving railroad box car. When we return to the school commissary, we see the exact same conversation as before, but this time from Turner’s perspective.
From here, Nickel Boys cuts back and forth between Elwood and Turner’s points of view. The (possibly petty) reason I was never able to fully connect with this bold formal choice was because it ultimately makes Nickel Boys feel more like a video game than a movie. I’m not a gamer – my serious interest in gaming ended sometime not long after the release of Super Mario Bros. 3 – but my brother is, and I’ve watched him play hours of first-person shooters and role-playing games over the years. The direct address to the camera as we experience the world through the eyes of either Elwood or Turner in Nickel Boys feels exactly like an exchange between, say, the player in Red Dead Redemption and an NPC delivering exposition on the next mission.
It's not that this technique has never been tried before, or that I’ve never enjoyed it. The protagonist’s field of vision – complete with blinking – is the only perspective we see in Gaspar Noé’s disorienting and revelatory Enter the Void, but the aesthetic choice works better in that movie because the main character is high on drugs the entire time and rarely interacts with other characters. The psychedelic hallucination that is Enter the Void lends itself to such an unconventional approach.
As sad as it feels to express, maybe the first-person perspective of Nickel Boys is exactly what the majority of white audiences need in order to meaningfully connect with a character of color. That’s plausible, since white people have been failing miserably of late in finding basic empathy for other human beings, specifically humans who are undocumented immigrants, trans people, and basically anyone who would be helped by DEI initiatives.
Hence, the need for a film as unconditionally compassionate and searing as Nickel Boys. (Although, Candice Frederick, writing for Huffington Post, makes the case that white proximity to the story is ultimately what drives the systemic decisions to lift up a movie like Nickel Boys, instead of, as Frederick argues, a movie like Exhibiting Forgiveness, which was mostly overlooked last year by critics and audiences alike possibly because, as Frederick puts it, the white characters in Exhibiting Forgiveness “are merely ornamental in the story.”)
Nickel Boys is based on two-time Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner Colson Whitehead’s novel – Whitehead won the Pulitzer for both Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, making him one of only four writers to win the award twice. The novel is a fictionalized account of students (really inmates) at Nickel Academy in Jim Crow-era Florida between the early to late 1960s. Nickel Academy is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, an infamous Florida reform school that operated between 1900 and 2011.
When Elwood – who we learn in the early scenes of the movie excels in academics – embarks on foot to pursue tuition-free study at an HBCU technical college, he accepts a ride from a man in a stolen car. When this Black man is pulled over (and subsequently brutalized) by a white police officer who recognizes the reported stolen car, Elwood is charged as an accomplice. He’s sentenced to Nickel, since he’s underage, and he soon learns that the brutal reform school is as hellish as any prison.
Based on what I knew of the story going into Nickel Boys, I expected it to be an absolutely gut-wrenching experience. But this is where Ross surprised me. Unlike Steve McQueen’s harrowing 12 Years a Slave, which some critics dismissed as high-brow torture porn, Ross presents many of the horrors at Nickel as exercises in dialectical montage. Hence a scene detailing a Nickel inmate’s dire mistake during the academy’s annual Black-White boxing match smash cutting to digital satellite imagery decades later of the excavation of unmarked mass graves surrounding the Nickel campus.
Elwood, with the help of Turner, quickly learns that, when it comes to the Black “students” at Nickel, it really might as well be a prison. The school is segregated, with the white population granted recreational activities, like throwing around a football, that are denied to the Black kids. While the Black population is kept in shabbier accommodations and given shallow and apathetic educational instruction, Elwood learns that the length of his sentence is irrelevant. Every Black inmate is kept until they age out, so that the school can profit on hiring them out as essentially enslaved labor.
Much of the abuse at Nickel – the Dozier School for Boys gained a horrific reputation for physical and sexual abuse (including beatings and rape), torture, and murder – happens off screen, with Ross providing telltale clues of the crimes against humanity through editing juxtapositions and character reactions.
In the most graphically violent sequence of Nickel Boys, in which Elwood is flogged for standing up for another of his inmates, Ross takes care to include an insert shot of the Holy Bible sitting on a table in the room adjacent to the punishment room. It acknowledges the fact of so much suffering, bigotry, and hate being justified by religion, and, specifically, the patriarchy and racism of the American Deep South’s twisted and evil interpretation of Christianity.
We also visit Elwood at later points in his life. We see him in what looks to be the late 1970s or early ‘80s, and again in the early 2000s, as he becomes consumed by news of the discovery of unmarked graves on and around the Nickel campus. In these flash-forwards, our perspective is behind Elwood, instead of through his eyes. The camera, which moves with the character like it’s strapped to his back, hovers immediately behind and slightly above Elwood’s head, showing us his distress as he cradles the back of his head with his hands while reading online accounts of the atrocities at Nickel. There is a surprise reveal in these flash-forwards in the final minutes of Nickel Boys that I won’t dare spoil here.
The most effective use of Ross’s first-person perspective comes in the opening minutes of his movie. We first see the world through the eyes of the toddler version of Elwood. It’s an impressionistic series of shots confined to the view from the floor. Then, eventually, we see the young man; his face is reflected in the window of a city bus as he looks out the window, but, because of the first-person perspective, his reflection also looks into the camera. It’s a striking bit of digital trickery that leaves a lasting impression. Moments like that aren’t quite enough to sustain the magic throughout the entire movie, but, like Barry Jenkins’s phenomenal limited-series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Ross creates a sometimes beautiful, often painful examination of history that many people in our society want to ignore.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Despite my reservations about Ross’s central aesthetic choice for Nickel Boys, his movie is a stunning piece of art detailing both the ugliness of racism from above and the inextinguishable resilience of hope from below.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Shout out to Academy ratio!
- This is one of those rare reviews where I didn’t mention any of the actors or performances. I think, in this instance, it’s because the two leads don’t really get to interact with each other or the other members of the cast, since the camera stands in for them for most of the movie. Both actors, Ethan Herisse — who was excellent in the Netflix limited series When They See Us — as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner, deliver sensitive and delicate performances despite the camera stepping in for them. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is divine as Hattie, Elwood’s grandmother.
- One of the biggest clues as to the real reason for these young men’s mistreatment — capitalism and bigotry instead of justice — goes by in seconds. We see the inmates picking fruit in a citrus orchard, and a boy that looks no older than about five or six walks by with a basket for collecting oranges. What on Earth could a kindergarten-age child have done to deserve a sentence in this place? Wikipedia lists the ages of boys held at Dozier as being three to twenty-one.
- I loved Ross’s use of the Sidney Poitier/Tony Curtis film The Defiant Ones.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- This is the worst year since I started this website of writing about as many of the Oscar Best Picture nominees before the nominations are announced. Before this review, I had only written about one (The Substance) of the eventual nominees. Usually I’ve written about at least three or four by the time I find out what the final list is. I enjoy going on the record with each Best Picture nominee, so I’ve got quite a bit of work to do, and, luckily, as with Nickel Boys, I have screener links from PR firms for quite a few of the nominees. I watched Nickel Boys at home on the couch with Rae and Coop.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
I spent most of 2024 adding these political missives to the end of each review. I doubt it had much of an impact. Someone I know personally, who reads each one of my reviews, couldn’t even be bothered to vote for Kamala Harris to help avoid the absolute disaster we’re now witnessing as Donald Trump does everything he can to destroy the US government in his second term. Upon reflection, I think I was writing these for that one person, and it hurt me a great deal to know that I couldn’t even convince one person. But, hope springs eternal, and I’m going to keep adding this section, in the foolish hope that it will do some good. Stay tuned for more of these alarms going into 2025.