Nickel Boys (2024 | USA | RUNTIME | RaMell Ross)
RaMell Ross’s exquisitely-shot close first-person perspective makes for an audacious act of interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel about an idealistic student unjustly incarcerated in a racist reform school through a cruel twist of fate.
The movie opens by flooding the screen with Jomo Fray’s gorgeous impressionistic cinematography, seemingly shot directly through the eyes of Elwood, a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow Tallahassee of the early 1960s (he’s played by Ethan Cole Sharp as a young child; Ethan Herisse takes over the teenage role). We only catch stray glimpses of his face in reflections, but we’re immersed in his whole world as it changes around him: quietly observing adults playing cards, seeing his grandmother (a luminous Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) at work in a diner, experiencing the Civil Rights milestones unfolding through televisions in department store windows. There’s an incredible tactility to these images that communicates an entire childhood, a sense of place, and a feeling of time that will be familiar to those who’ve encountered Fray’s work in Raven Jackson’s impressionistic All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
Soon enough, the years rush by and we encounter Elwood in high school, guided by an inspirational former Freedom Rider Civics teacher who takes an interest in his intellect and his commitment to the movement. Through all of these teenage experiences — being photographed at a protest, drawing the attention of girls, encountering the promise of advancing his education — we remain firmly within Elwood’s point-of-view, seeing his world in reaction. As the minutes tick on, the choice begins to induce a kind of anxiety as we wonder when the storytelling will finally settle into something more conventional. To Ross’s credit, it never lets up.
On first watch, it’s bold yet disorienting choice. Repeat viewing cements the decision to stay within the character’s viewpoint as essential to the film’s success. We feel the anxiety as a ride to a better future swerves chaotically off track and experience the steadfast sadness of his grandmother as she prepares to surrender him to the reform school (Ellis-Taylor preparing a lonely slice of cake at the dining room table makes for one of the most unforgettable scenes of the year). But the biggest payoff of this fixed perspective comes when withdrawn Elwood befriends another savvier veteran of student at the school and suddenly we begin to get more and more glimpses through someone else’s eyes. As Turner, Brandon Wilson opens the world for both Elwood and the audience. The effect is one of experiencing firsthand a life-changing friendship forged amid intolerable cruelty.
Like Whitehead’s novel, the story bounces through time, with glimpses of a present day in which the school’s heinous abuses (based on the investigations of the real-life Dozier School) are unearthed. From his arrival, the differential treatment of the White and Black students is stark and upsetting: the white kids play football on the lawn; the Black kids are conscripted to fieldwork. A sweltering classroom focuses on conformity rather than scholarship and severe punishments are dispensed for the slightest violations.
The book famously conceals a twist, but Ross’s use of constrained perspective does so much more than preserve it. It shows us the abuses on the character’s terms — we hear students talking about them, see their scars, or follow Elwood as he faces them himself, but the gory details are largely kept off the screen. Elwood’s friendship with Turner also brings him a better job assignment outside the school’s grounds, a respite by which the two friends tag along with one of the school’s employees (Fred Hechinger), which gives him an inside look at the structural abuses of the school: selling supplies to local businesses, hiring students out to do odd jobs, and fixing sporting events for the benefit of donors. It’s a respite from the backbreaking work at the field that gives them moments to grow their relationship outside the pressure of the school, but it’s also where Elwood’s idealism ultimately gets the better of him. Although the story is grim, it is also suffused with moments of tenderness and beauty, an enveloping world into itself.
The character viewpoint shots occasionally give way to archival footage, recontextualizing the past and opening a window beyond the confines of the school, or gesture toward the unreliability and authorship or the narration. Ross also plays with the flow of time, both abstractly as well as jumping ahead decades (where the back of Daveed Diggs’s head takes on the role of an adult Elwood building a business and life in New York). Together, the film’s stridently reconsiders ownership of Southern Black representation and challenges traditional notions of objectivity in favor of the subjective truth of lived experience. It’s unlike anything else: elevating an adaption of a powerful novel to something even more provocative, singular, emotionally resonant, and stunningly original.
Nickel Boys arrives in Seattle theaters on January 17th
A version of this review originally appeared after the film’s world premiere at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. Image courtesy Amazon MGM.