Nickel Boys

In translating Colson Whitehead's 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel to the screen, director and co-writer RaMell Ross employs a similarly lyrical and impressionistic approach to the one he took with his groundbreaking, Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Set in Jim Crow era Tallahassee, Florida, Whitehead's story follows a young African-American kid named Elwood Curtis whose ambition and scholastic aptitude are fostered by his Black freedom rider teacher, who encourages him to enroll in a tuition-free accelerated study program at an All-Black University. But fate intervenes when he is arrested after hitchhiking to campus and getting picked up by a man driving a stolen car. Wrongfully convicted of being an accomplice to the theft, young Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school where the Black inmates are used as laborers. At Nickle, Elwood meets the similarly quiet and thoughtful Turner, and the two become friends.

Whitehead's book tells the story of these two boys from their different perspectives. Elwood is an idealist, inspired by his former teacher and the non-violent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Turner is a cynic who doesn't see how working toward political change will ultimately affect his life or the lives of anyone he knows. Ross's first-person camera attempts to convey these differing visions. At first, the story seems as if it will be told to us entirely through Elwood's eyes, as the only times we catch a glimpse of him are when he sees himself in a mirror or reflected in glass. But when he meets Turner, the film's point of view shifts, and we experience how others see Elwood. From that point on, the movie jumps back and forth between the two boys' perspectives and, at another key moment, introduces a distinctly new viewpoint from one of the boys, now grown to manhood.

This shifting of POVs frees Nickel Boys from ending up as the same stiff gimmick movie that just about every other film attempting to tell its story through the eyes of its protagonist has resulted in. The first and most famous example of this technique, Robert Montgomery's 1947 film noir Lady in the Lake, demonstrated that the lens of a camera and the way it moves through two-dimensional space has about as much in common with the way the human eye processes movement in the real world as listening to a scratchy old 78 RPM vinyl recording of a piece of classical music played back at 45 RPM has with sitting in a grand symphony hall and listening to an orchestra play that same piece of music. Ross doesn't lock his film's POV down in a failed attempt to transform the viewer into the character but rather uses it as a way to filter the standard cinematic language of close-ups, medium shots, wide shots, intercutting of perspective, and elliptical edits that jump forward in time by seconds and minutes or by days and years.

The key to why Ross's approach rises above a mere gimmick is the first key transition in perspective, a repeated scene shown once from Elwood's POV and then from Turner's. It's a simple yet incredibly effective way of establishing the movie's visual language. When I first saw Nickel Boys at The Independent Film Festival Boston, a smarter, quicker than me with a pithy insight film critic friend of mine made the apt comparison of this repeated scene with the brilliantly effortless way The Hunt For Red October establishes how all its Russian-speaking naval officers will switch to speaking English, for the benefit of the audience, during the bulk of the movie until they meet up with the American characters and revert back to the Russian they really never stopped speaking to each other.

While I felt Ross's technique worked, I wasn't sure it was ultimately the best way to serve this story. I left that first screening thinking more about the film and the filmmaker than the characters and the story. And, while I liked the movie very much, I wasn't drawn to watch it again. Of course, a movie's greatness isn't measured simply by how much it engenders the desire for replete viewings. There are incredibly powerful, devastating, brilliantly made pictures that one might only want to see once in their lifetime. Still, I believe that a significant measure of cinematic greatness is a film's ability to reveal different things to you upon repeated viewings if you choose to go back and see them again. I wondered if Ross's first-person experiment would prevent the movie from allowing such discoveries upon revisits. I decided I would wait to write about Nickel Boys until I had seen it again, and that opportunity came a few months later during the film's general release when I had the chance to see it presented in 35mm.

Though this movie is quite obviously shot digitally, I appreciated the way the film transfer gave the images a warmer feeling than when I first saw it in 4K digital projection. However, my second viewing confirmed my feeling that the way Ross chose to bring Whitehead's book to the screen, though it may have been good for getting the movie noticed, doesn't do much for the story itself. Nickel Boys stands out, and its style of storytelling certainly differentiates it from a standard social issue drama. That's great if you are of the mind that thinks the typical approach of Hollywood social issue dramas is vastly inferior to the now-common indie arthouse aesthetic of shooting movies in tight close-ups with hand-held cameras, often focusing on small, physical details and making them larger than life. I'm not of this school of thought. I find that approach, as exemplified by the prior year's maddeningly photographed All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, to be limiting.

Nickel Boys is a powerful story. Whitehead drew inspiration for his novel from the gruesome accounts of child abuse, beatings, killings, and mass burials in unmarked graves at Florida's Dozier School for Boys, which were uncovered decades after the school closed down. The film version of this story is beautifully acted and has a slow, contemplative pace that invites the viewer to reflect on America's history of racial segregation and violence as it unfolds. But if the goal is to make us feel closer to the experience of the characters than we would if we were watching a more traditionally photographed feature film, I don't think that key aspect succeeds.