Nickel Boys (2024)
Nickel Boys (2024)
Some movies are simply better translated onto the screen than others. RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys’ is one of them. It is an interesting reimagining of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer winning novel. One can be rather certain about the film with the confidence that rules the story. The film constructs the powerful tale of a young Elwood and Turner, two black children who navigated through the harsh realities of segregation in Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a pretty smart idealist who got wrongfully sent to Nickel Academy which was an abusive reform school. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the friend he finds during those dark times. With inventiveness, the movie Nickel Boys portrays a story of the black girls and boys during the teenage years.
This is not a film that is gentle on its viewers. To create the image of the world through Turners perspective and Elwood’s perspective, Ross and his talented Dp Jomo Fray cut between the two throughout the film. If the perspective of a black person is difficult to understand for you, then the film is not the problem.
It appears that the same bold and clear cut strategy was employed by Ross in regard of the documentary feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening whereby the film engages with a Southern Black town not by talking about it but by observing its movements. The retooling of that desire here, in a fictional realm, the director’s first foray in that narrative mode, has a lot of risks involved. The chances with “Nickel Boys” a clear masterpiece connected with visual grandeur and weird performances is rewarding.
We are introduced into the world of the film Hans in hand with Elwood Curtis of the younger scenes played by Ethan Cole Sharp through a collage of action filled sequences with lovely images such as a beautiful Christmas tree, children climbing monkey bar to parent rolling away to vulnerable children. What he knows for certain is that his nice grandmother by the name Also I am proud to say that Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Tallahassee, FL has lived all her life as a maid in a motel. And while he realizes such are dangerous times, the summer of the civil rights movement following the words of Lloyd’s leadership has provided him justification that for black people, the dark days are over.
This is a perception that neither his grandmother nor his teacher Mr. Hill, who was once a Freedom Rider, cares to correct. One such interlocutor is impressed by Elwood’s determination to be active in the cause by raising money and protesting. Guided by one of them, he learns about some college in the area that allows high school students to join classes. As he is making his way to that school, he catches a ride with a stranger who is an automobile thief but Elwood is oblivious of all that. When the police catch the two together, they assume Elwood is a partner and take him to Nickel.
Thus that strong desire handed down to him by his grandmother does not do Elwood any good at Nickel where the surrounding countryside curbs any attempt of Elwood to look behind the strong thick walls that would no doubt be the scene of horror and terrifying experience. But if Turner had not shown up, one imagines his chances of survival in such harsh conditions were pretty slim. Through that inviting look of his we see Elwood. Sometimes the camera alternates between them, while at other times it only glances away for a millisecond. Now these two young quotes: actors Herisse and Wilson have served and continue serving moving performances in the film. Even if they are not there physically in the same shots trembling as muscles to show up, their reliance on each other’s eyes, looks and attitudes communicate the significance of the other to the scene.
In a story that does not seem to care about evoking your sympathy it expects you to care for these boys not due to what the movies tell you to do but they are human – these actors do manage to capture your focus.
For example, the flashback in the story, depicting an older version of Elijah Elwood (Daveed Diggs) decades in the future, who is shown from the back, frees us from the excessive weight of some sort of racism which persists to this day, and which wasn’t combat that many years. In the same context, the purpose of photographs, crude black and white images of black kids behind bars, black youth during Christmas and even Apollo 8, all impact and reconstruct our relationship with the western world’s history which the book was engaging.
The collaborative effort between Ross, Ellis and Fray is spectacular to the point of being unbelievable. They take what appears to be an almost unfilm-able book and compress the languorous poetics of Whitehead into a film whose rhythmic penalization of images would be simply breathtaking if it were not so mortifying. There are many scenes in the film which are striking in their melancholy: the adult Elwood meeting a former fellow-reformatory inmate at a pub; affectionate caresses by Hattie; fertile orange groves where even young Black girls are set to work. Each shot of “Nickel Boys” serves not only as a recreation of a certain event its dank atmosphere, heady smell, and clammy feel but also the feel of the marginalized. It is the assimilation of the cruel external reality into the inner point of view that grants this kind of POV a purpose that is fleshy rather than just a trick, and elevates it into a fully fleshed performance that adds to and undermined decades of film language.
The socio-economic relations besides race and sex do a similar number. Elwood maintains, as do Turner and all other architects of the movement, that any achievement may be realized through determination, especially that which is associated with passive demonstration. Turner, in contrast, adopts a more realistic perspective.
He thinks that the best approach is straightforward staying alive. Their association stands exactly in the same paradigm as that of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” which film is referred while watching “Nickel Boys” several times. “The Defiant Ones”, of course, never existed outside the whites’ imagination, and they did stated that mutual understanding and at least some amount of a Black man’s effort to compromise may be enough. On the other hand, however, Nickel Boys was written with no such expectations. So freedom is tough work, and ‘Nickel Boys’ also understands that there is a cost associated with any idea of freedom as well.
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- Genre: Drama, Popular Movies
- Country: United States
- Director: RaMell Ross
- Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Cole Sharp, Sam Malone, Najah Bradley, Jase Stidwell, Legacy Jones, Jimmie Fails, Bill Martin Williams
