Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel of the same name, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys grapples with a level of tragedy and systemic abuse that’s almost impossible to comprehend, and in doing so, has devised an ingenious formal conceit to address the nature of tunnel vision and selective memory. Predominantly set in the mid-’60s at an all-male reformatory school in Florida — here called the Nickel Academy, which is based on the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys — the film depicts the daily hardships of two black adolescents serving time at the facility, which functions less as rehabilitation and more as indentured servitude. However, rather than take a holistic view of the mistreatment visited upon the young men at Nickel, the film is focused almost exclusively on the lived experiences of its two main characters at the expense of everything beyond their immediate field of vision. That’s meant literally here. Ross has made the decision — an uncommonly adventurous one for a studio film — to present this story from a first-person perspective; treating the POV of the camera as the eyes and ears of juvenile detainees Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). In essence, our perception of events is entirely dependent on how much either young man is capable of observing and what they remember. It’s the rare film about sweeping injustice that spurns the global for the subjective.
Initially, we follow only Elwood, watching him grow up in the south raised by his adoring grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Inspired by Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement — the teenager attends a protest of a segregated movie theater but flees before arrests are made, pitifully pleading to his grandmother: “Next time I want to do the civil disobedience part” — and the space race, Elwood demonstrates aptitude at school and is referred to a nearby technical institute for advanced classes. But after hitching a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car, Elwood picks up a criminal charge and is wrenched from his grandmother’s embrace and is sent to Nickel Academy, where his days are spent working the grounds and keeping his head down so as not to run afoul of the various authority figures who make no bones about their use of corporal punishment. Eventually, he befriends the more streetwise Turner, who’s the only student to show him kindness (the introduction of another protagonist doesn’t change the use of first-person camera, but it does allow the film to shift perspectives to a second point of view, with the filmmaking becoming slightly more conventional to allow for shot-reverse-shot during conversations and key exchanges). Turner seems to know all the angles when it comes to Nickel: how to prolong a cushy job doing maintenance at the home of one of the school’s administrators, how to get out of manual labor in the sweltering sun to run errands selling surplus supplies in the nearby town, and where he and Elwood can lay out and read books or listen to the radio during the day where nobody will notice. But Turner understands all too well what’s happening at Nickel; specifically, the “imaginative” and cruel ways the school maintains order and ensures abundant free labor, and especially how many of the teens who supposedly ran away are actually buried on the school grounds. Elwood believes that by documenting the horrific events they’ve witnessed or personally endured, then they could bring down the entire murderous operation. But Turner knows better, and the idea terrifies him.
Ross — whose previous film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening took a similarly impressionistic approach to presenting the life of Black people in the modern American south — is more concerned with ephemera and moments out of time that stay with us rather than explicit incidents. The atrocities of Nickel Academy are largely elided; bleeding into the film primarily through documentary footage and still photos incorporated throughout, as well as a B-story set some years later best left discovered by the viewer. Myopia, compartmentalizing trauma, and knowing not to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong are treated as the only ways to make it out of Nickel alive. As such, the most upsetting elements of the film are often inferred via hushed shorthand, innuendo, and inhuman yet unplaceable sounds coming from just beyond the frame. In this respect, the film recalls László Nemes’ Son of Saul, which presents the soul-searing experiences of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz where the camera remains fixed on the face of its title character throughout; we’re constantly aware of the atrocities happening in our presence, but they remain at all times obscured by the locked perspective. While the effect is similar here, Ross’ approach is less heavy-handed, and one of the more disarming elements of Nickel Boys is how much room the film makes for moments of stray beauty or whimsy, even amidst an oppressive institution. Shot in a boxy academy ratio (all the better to convey moving through life with blinders on), Jomo Fray’s cinematography is streaked with warm natural light, evoking what under other circumstances might be considered idyllic summer days. The film’s focus is on the picayune but indelible: stray images that lodge themselves into our consciousness and serve as bittersweet reminders of the past: a brochure fastened to the fridge by a magnet slowly sliding to the ground; a balloon being batted around by a ceiling fan; a single stray marble bouncing down concrete steps; a small child scooting along the floorboards of a school bus, absentmindedly painting circles on a picnic table. And on it goes. That also extends to the film’s aggressive sound design, which makes extensive use of directional sound to convey offscreen space (pity the poor viewer who will only see the film in stereo at home), as well as everything that we sense is happening behind closed doors or outside the dormitory walls late at night that we can’t bring ourselves to investigate.
It’s all of a piece with the film’s mission to convey events that are confusing in the particulars yet understood deep in our bones. Perhaps the most bracing thing about Nickel Boys, then, is how much the film encourages surface-level confusion; leaving the viewer adrift for long stretches only to eventually pull away the veil and present reality in sobering detail. This even extends to the casting of a major supporting character whose exact nature within the story is long obscured, to the point they’re filmed from behind throughout (the actor’s face is concealed for the majority of the film, but fans of musical theater will likely recognize the performer’s voice). One of the dominating themes of the film is willful ignorance and how much we allow ourselves to deny reality, and even our own culpability, as a means of survival. Nickel Boys treats the past as a mystery, even to those who lived it; first as a coping mechanism, and ultimately as another form of bondage. It places us not just in the shoes of characters who have been through something unimaginable, but in their confused mindsets as well. The result is as exhilarating as it is heartbreaking.
DIRECTOR: RaMell Ross; CAST: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Daveed Diggs; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: December 13; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 20 min.
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