There are films that simply outshine other films in all aspects. RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys”, a film that adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into cinematic proportions, is made to a very high polish. It develops such confidence which comes like the first dregs of the strong chill blowing in during the overly humid, sun-exposed days of subtropical summer that most people would want to appreciate during the season of despair over the two niggers called el windows and Turner in a segregated Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a bright, innocent boy who gets sent off to a cruelty-filled reform school, far from his home soil, which is called the Nickel Academy. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the brilliant boy who becomes his friend before, during and after those dark passages of nightmares. The Nickel Boys lifts the curtain on the perspective of these Black teens in a quite stylised fashion and without a twitch of a mousy hand.
This is not a film that caresses your ass. As the film intercuts between Turner and Elwood, Ross and his fantastic DP Jomo Fray show the audience what it feels like to be Black and how the world feels when looking through a Black perspective. If the lesson does not stick, it is not the fault of the film.
This is precisely the courageous and straightforward approach Ross took with his documentary feature “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” which also laid great stress on the viewers to engage with a Southern Black town through its moving images. This retooling of that desire here, in the fictional mode, the director’s first attempt at that narrative style, has many possibilities but quite a lot of dangers for sure. In “Nickel Boys,” a clearly bold work that installs all its ideas in images and relies on extravagant imagery and quirks rather unusual for America, this was a true challenge but worth the risk.
The audience plunges into the world of the film from the very beginning where there is an energetic edit of pleasant images like a twinkling Christmas tree or children playing on monkey bars, and one of the parents who will soon ditch the main character is introduced slowly, a younger version of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Cole Sharp) coming into view during this prologue. We find Elwood Curtis in Tallahassee, Florida, with his caring grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in an impressive performance) who is also a maid in the motel. He knows that there is danger out there but he is sooo emboldened that it cannot get worse for Black people than it already is thanks to Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights movement.
It is a belief which is held by his grandmother and even his teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmy Fails), a retired Freedom fighter, doesn’t seem ready to debunk it. It is the latter who, encouraged by Elwood’s pacifism and his willingness to support the cause financially and politically, informs him of a community college that has high school students. One of those days, Elwood tries to get to that school, and on his way gets a lift with a stranger who unbeknowningly is in a stolen car. When police are apprised of the scenario, and catch them both, Elwood becomes an accomplice and said is remitted into Nickel.
The bitter truth that his grandmother presents to him therefore does not prove helpful to him at Nickel Center which has a serene environment although it has some invading shadows inside. But for the appearance of Turner, you can almost imagine Elwood would have succumbed easily in such unmerciful environment in no time. We see Elwood through his warm and encouraging eyes. At moments the lens oscillates from one to the other, at moments, only briefly dilutes the frames without leaving them. They are the emotional spine of the film that along with co-stars Herisse and Wilson keeps the sentiment of the film intact. As much as they physically, or rather, do not, appear in scenes together — you sense both of their energy inside quarters of the other’s glare, face and stance.
This film is not designed to set up the emotion in the viewers. It expects the audiences to love these boys, not because the film logic demands it, but because they are human. The viewers are forced to focus on the actions of the actors in this scene.
As modernity forces us headlong into the middle of the story’s span, into an older view of Elwood that is seen from behind, so does this more spine-grinding temporality directed at the current timeframe who is revolving from the current scant regard given to so-called modern racism surging to the 80s. A similar trend can be marked when different archives emerging out of the core of the film concerning images of Black Undermounted Children, or holiday celebrations of Black Children, or Apollo 8 impact on our relations with the white colonial narrative on which the film battles.
The writerly work by Ross and screenwriter Joslyn Barnes, along with Fray, is quite frankly incredible. They take something that feels like one of the most difficult books to put on the screen and recast the easy poetry of Whitehead into a movie whose images are not gorgeous but nightmarish in their beauty and which batter the viewer into submission so hard with an array of such images that none can overcome merely being beautiful. There are many scenes that keep this balance of prettiness and sadness: an adult Elwood meeting Nickel’s former inmate at a bar, in soft light; Hattie’s warm, comforting arms; vast orange orchards in which even little Black children are made to work. The “Nickel Boys” features every visual element even in the recreation of a moment – thick humidity trapped in the room, heavy pent up heat of the corpus, rough and rigid surface – and the feeling of what is being discarded. That is why this abuse of the algorithm allows for this imaginative point of view to be executed in such a literal manner: the viewer understands that there’s a fog, but it is on the reader’s experiences in integrating the maddening world with the internal point of view that this internal point of view works, and therefore, it is not a gimmick but a well-executed craft that adds and dismantles decades of cinematic language.
The politics of the film go under similar upheavals. Elwood is of quite a constructive opinion, that just needs the right amount of determination to slay any hurdle, in this case, that of a nonviolent activist. Turner, on the other hand, is a staunch pragmatist.
He thinks of plain and simple survival as the ticket. Their relationship is almost the same as that of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in the movie ‘The Defiant Ones,’ which the novel ‘Nickel Boys’ has a few subtle references to. Of course, “The Defiant Ones” belongs to the realm of make belief of white Hollywood. It claims that racism can indeed be tackled and defeat by going through mutual respect andHaving the Black man to some extent, making a little giving. “Nickel Boys,” for example, does not such illusions. The road to freedom is, then, treacherous. And ‘Nickel Boys’ understands that freedom can’t ever be fully conceived without any cost.
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