I went into Nickel Boys with a hazy recollection of Colson Whitehead's novel and with the knowledge that RaMell Ross's film took an unusual approach of relaying its story through first person point of view shots. I had also previously seen Ross's exquisite nonficiton film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a sensory experience as much as any film can offer. As someone who grew up in the rural American south, I've seen few movies that capture the landscape and feelings of it so vividly. Besides Hale County, a few come to mind: Phil Morrison's Junebug and Chantal Akerman's South. Films about the south often paint things with broad strokes (and with broad, unconvincing accents), or tend to simplify racial injustices. Ross's two films are the antithesis of broad and simplistic. Nickel Boys is both so intimate, specific, prickly and expansive, that it feels like your bobbing along, riding a single wave, and then suddenly, experiencing an entire ocean.
While Whitehead's work is fiction, adapted here by Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes, it is rooted in historical horrors. The Dozier School for Boys, a "reform school," segregated until 1966, and riddled with abuse and murder, was established in 1900 and didn't close until 2011 (which illustrates how history is always present; as James Baldwin notes in I Am Not Your Negro, "History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history." Nickel Boys structurally, formally and subject matter-wise, as it dips into different time periods, echoes this). In the years after the school's closure, unmarked graves of young men were excavated. In Nickel Boys, the brutal institution is the Nickel Academy in Florida (the film was largely shot in Louisiana).
Teenaged Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), optimistic, about to embark to college, and on the cusp of adulthood in the early 1960s, is forced to go to the Nickel Academy after an innocuous mishap (basically, being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time). He leaves behind his grandmother, Hattie (an extremely affecting Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and a promising life ahead. Nickel Academy is a set of cramped, squat buildings, run by stern, emotionally and physically abusive men. The boys are given slop-like meals and minutes to shower, huddled together with a meager bar of soap. The white boys are allowed to play football every once in a while, the black boys are not. The school isn't sure what to do with a Mexican kid (to them, not white enough and not brown enough) who drifts in and out almost facelessly of the film's proceedings like a ghost. There are perfunctory tiers within the school, from "Grub" to "Ace"--perhaps a promise of freedom if one gets to that level. But from the get-go, the film insinuates a nauseating, sinking feeling of impossibility for these young kids. Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the two bond. As this friendship progresses, so does a powerful, symbiotic bond (illustrated aptly and beautifully by the film's use of POV).
In its search of developing a unique cinematic language through its adaptation of a novel (the tight POVs almost feel like the act of reading a book), and in its mesmerizing and tactile invocation of and resistance to memory, Nickel Boys flourishes. Ross's direction is bold, continuously surprising and resonant. Much credit should be given to Jomo Fray, the cinematographer who also lensed the striking All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (of his work there, I wrote, "The capturing of earthy imagery, like the silt and mud under shallow water, by cinematographer Jomo Fray, who shot on 35mm, makes All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt a unique cinematic gem"). The dynamic undertaking in Nickel Boys is otherworldly to me. I can't quite wrap my head around how he and Ross (and editor Nicholas Monsour) were able to pull and shape this all together so seamlessly, while keeping the narrative focused. Because of what ultimately happens to its two lead characters, in many ways, I can't think of another way this novel could have been adapted. While there is a certain missing of seeing full-bodied performances (especially because Herisse and Wilson are so good in what we see of them), alongside the reactions of others, there is also the ticking sensation of feeling as if you are within minds (in the Q&A after the film, they called it "sentient" point-of-views). To elucidate this effect, the actors strapped cameras on themselves, including their chests and hips. It's incredible work. Perhaps the directness and tightness of Whitehead's novel as source material keeps the film from floating out into outer space (which it literally does sometimes, with insert shots evoking the dreamy, hopeful drive of America's 1960s space race). There may be some attempts to mimic Ross's efforts here, but the project as a whole is so deeply felt and realized, it seems hard to duplicate this film's particular power.
While there are some well-trodden touchstones of 60s culture that's inferred, it's always specific to relating to its characters. And sometimes, the references are ironic, strangely, and memorably presented (a paperboard standee of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the whistling of the Andy Griffith theme in the institution's clinic area). The weary 1967 song, "I Gotta Get the World Off My Back" (missing from the film's end credits; perhaps a late addition to the soundtrack), plays on the radio in an early 60s scene, but its lyrics capture so much of Elwood's predicament and future.
Besides perspective, the use of sound is also critical to the film. In an early scene, there's a small moment where Hattie is frosting a cake, and takes her fingers to the knife to wipe off some excess frosting. It's shot with a mix of a faraway shot (Elwood watching her, somewhat distantly from a doorway), close-ups, and tangible sound effects. It's these small, intimate moments that reflect not only characterization, but a certain sense of inner psychology--where does the human eye (and ear) tend to land and focus upon? When we get to a pivotal scene of abuse, the camera moves in upon extreme close-ups of still, black & white photographs (of real boys from Dozier), backed with shattering sound effects (are we listening to sound effects, or the film's gritty, unsettling, industrial score by Alex Somers & Scott Alario, or both?). I immediately thought of the opening credits of a very different film, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where there are grimy close-ups of corpses mixed with the chilling, grinding sound of a camera flash. The unsettling feeling is about what we see, hear and imagine without the camera showing much to us at all. ****
-Jeffery Berg
