Images courtesy of Orion Pictures
NICKEL BOYS– 4 STARS
Without question, the most striking artistic quality of many on display in RaMell Ross’s brilliant and heartwrenching drama Nickel Boys is the design given to the audience’s viewpoint. Teaming with All Roads Taste of Salt cinematographer Jomo Fray, Ross assigns the camera the boxier Academy ratio and has it act as an alternating station of first-person points of view. In a short while, you, the viewer, get accustomed to the character exchanges with the camera, the mirror switches, and the weighty angular whips and pans. You cannot take your eyes off of the picture because the picture, thanks the use of this perspective, cannot take its eyes off of you either, and that’s a hell of an effect.
Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s bracing 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, which tredded through the history of the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a former juvenile reform institution in the Marianna, Florida, and earned the author his second Pulitizer Prize for Fiction in 2020. Matching Whitehead’s novel, RaMell Ross, making his narrative feature debut after his Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, employs nonlinear storytelling with two timelines to shed light on the life of Elwood Curtis.
Elwood’s story begins in the 1960s as a diligent student who impresses his Black school teachers. Encouraged to look beyond the selective and sanitized history he reads in his textbooks, the young boy shows the fervent potential to be someone wise, helpful, and special when he’s older. Growing into a teen to be played by gentle newcomer Ethan Herisse (seen earlier this year in the The American Society of Magical Negroes), Elwood begins to participate in the Civil Rights Movement activities in his local area, which troubles the benevolent and cherished grandmother Hattie (King Richard Oscar nominee Aunjunae Ellis-Taylor) who raises him.
LESSON #1: THE POWER OF EYE CONTACT– Circling back to the beginning superlatives, viewpoints become the guidance conduits of everything in Nickel Boys. Children and youths are often the ultimate voyeurs both as wandering eye watchers and urgent attention seekers. How far someone can see is linked to earshot limitations for hearing and listening as well. Nevertheless, the framing and movements of Jomo Wray create the illusion of posture and deftly capture the targets of focus the characters find and choose. After a hard stare, a wondrous gawk, a nervous peek, or fleeting glimpse of notice, once eye contact is made with the camera acting as our characters, moments develop, particularly when the eyes on the other side of the camera belong to the divine Aunjunae Ellis-Taylor. Extending an impressive streak that includes King Richard, The Color Purple, and Origin, the luminous Ms. Ellis-Taylor chalks up a second tremendous matronly performance for 2024 after Exhibiting Forgiveness.
Soon after Elwood earns acceptance at a HBCU for a tuition-exempt accelerated study program, he is pegged by police as a false accomplice to a car theft when he was only the hitchhiking passenger. Convicted as a minor, Elwood is sent to the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in rural Florida. There, he befriends the equally meek Turner, played by Brandon Wilson of The Way Back. With combined efforts on the inside of hopeful good behavior during stints of harsh physical labor and the outside legal fight waged by Hattie, the young men long for their release. The kinship conveyed by Herisse and Wilson is the endearing anchor of Nickel Boys, through and through, and the actors are captivating with their sobering portrayals.
LESSON #2: THE HIDDEN AND NOT-SO-HIDDEN SOURCES OF CRUELTY AND ABUSE– As Nickel Boys ventures into the dark recesses of the administrative practices of the Nickel Academy, the hints at off-screen corruption and violence increase. Utilizing that witnessing power of the cinematography, much of the trauma is shielded. For the viewer bound to what the camera shows with its gaze, the mental suggestions created likely are as cryptic as the unseen truths. The Dozier School for Boys operated in plain sight for 111 years. Hundreds of boys went “missing,” and too few people cared because they were “criminals” and “colored.” It took a failed inspection in 2009 to trigger a full investigation that produced appalling and still-incomplete results.
More and more, it becomes readily apparent in Nickel Boys that many young men never made it out of the facility, which is where the true Dozier story seeps into the film as a jolt of hard reality and dramatic heft. The reverberations of what transpired at the Nickel Academy singe the second timeline of Nickel Boy showing an middle-aged Elwood Curtis in the 2010s. Played facelessly by Hamilton Tony Award winner Daveed Diggs, Elwood runs a painting business in New York City. After years of suppressing the horrors of his teen years, he is closely following the news stories breaking of Nickel’s closure and investigations. Even more heard than seen, Diggs shoulders this movie’s coda mightily.
LESSON #3: BEING AT AN ARM’S LENGTH– Some of this intentional “arm’s length” perspective in Nickel Boys calls to mind the classic idiomatic saying of keeping things away from you. In a way and following Lesson #1, this distance is the space provided for talk when two people are together, friends or otherwise. In Ross’s film, the tools to close those gaps are the arms and hands acting as extensions of the body. The structuring of encounters enables Fray’s camera to capture hands that are welcoming, defensive, or in neutral places in between. It takes a special act or person to close the arm’s length of space, making even the simple gestures of a handshake or, even more impactful, a hug matter in the most enormous ways for characters that lack and crave that affection.
Ranging from scaffolded parallels to Martin Luther King Jr., Stanley Kramer’s progressive classic The Defiant Ones, and NASA’s Apollo program running concurrently in the social landscape to the symbolic appearances of alligators and donkeys, RaMell Ross’s swirling current of dreamy positive and negative imagery cements its overflowing empathy. By Ross’s own words, the camera intensifies objectivity and that speaks volumes for Nickel Boys. Its well-executed impact begs audiences to become further informed on the tragedy after finishing the film. In the end, we cannot let go of what the eyes and arms want, especially if those needs cannot be attained due to the grim circumstances of the story. Better than many works by peers and contemporaries, Nickel Boys longs for us to hold dear the bonds of protective brotherhood with a fascinating filmic experience.
LOGO DESIGNED BY MEENTS ILLUSTRATED (#1272)
