Nickel Boys
RaMell Ross’s highly-acclaimed look at reform school in Florida proves to be a deeply ambitious and serious work – but is it a masterpiece?
Image courtesy of Curzon Films Distributors.
The first two feature films made by RaMell Ross have a great deal in common and that could be considered surprising given that 2018's Hale County This Morning, This Evening was a documentary while Nickel Boys is a drama with actors. But for all their stylistic differences both films are concerned with the everyday lives of black people in America and are made with the same intention in mind.
For his earlier film Ross looked at a community in Alabama where the majority were poor and black, picked out a number of individuals as central figures and filmed over a period of years. In taking us into their world he was keen to reveal not just the special pressures on their lives but the extent to which all humanity has so many shared problems that we should be able to recognise just how much we all have in common. That aim meant that one feature of the Hale County documentary was to encourage white audiences to identify directly with the black lives caught on screen. The approach adopted in Nickel Boys may be different in other ways but, no less than its predecessor, it is a work dealing with black lives – in this case largely in Florida in the 1960s – and in telling the story of a black youth from Tallahassee named Elwood Curtis the same sense of identification is being sought.
In adapting Colson Whitehead's book for the screen, Ross and his co-writer Joslyn Barnes have found a visual approach which for much of the time literally makes us see things through Elwood's eyes. What Ross does here is to revisit an idea that was central to a film made back in 1946, Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake. That had involved making the camera stand in for the film’s central character, that well-known private eye Philip Marlowe, so that we saw what he saw and heard his voice but never saw the man himself other than in a mirror. In Nickel Boys this same method is applied at the outset in scenes portraying the home life of Elwood as a child (Ethan Cole Sharp). Once Elwood approaches the age of seventeen and hopes to go to a technical college, the role is taken by Ethan Herisse and for a while the same form of presentation continues. This extends to Elwood's arrival at a reform school, Nickel Academy, having landed up there due to an unlucky stroke of fate (on his way to Melvin Griggs College he had accepted a lift in a car which, quite unknown to him, had been stolen and when the police stop it they seize the passenger as well as the driver). Once in the correctional facility Elwood will encounter another inmate who becomes a close friend, this being Turner played by Brandon Wilson, and some later scenes will be shown from Turner's viewpoint thus putting the film’s favoured device into reverse.
But, while these point of view shots play a strong role and have led many critics to admire the film for its unusual approach, others have declared that some audiences will find it hard to adjust. In point of fact this rarely used focus has its advantages when it comes to the scenes in Nickel Academy since Elwood’s sense of being enclosed there is the more strongly felt by the emphasis on his viewpoint (the film also favours the more limited 1.33:1 ratio of a past era). However, the earlier scenes evoking Elwood's childhood are less suited to this mode because, rather than following a distinct narrative line, they play as just a series of impressions and sometimes mere glimpses which have little real sense of any meaningful shape. Their arbitrary character was for me reminiscent of Hale County This Morning, This Evening where the same weakness undermined the impact of the film and here it is an element which is not confined to the opening scenes but very much present throughout extending as it does to occasional flashbacks and also to sequences which jump forward in time and suddenly show Elwood as a much older man. Daveed Diggs plays him in these scenes but in another instance of stylisation Ross opts to shoot most of his scenes with the camera just behind him so that we keep seeing the back of his head. The reason for this measure eludes me and the film is also full of intrusive intercuts such as footage about Apollo 13 intended to indicate events going on in the outside world. The sudden appearance of two clips from what is a favourite film of Ross, 1958’s The Defiant Ones, may have more relevance but again they emerge unexpectedly and in a rather bizarre manner.
On the Hale County documentary, no less an arthouse figure than Apichatpong Weerasethakul was credited as ‘creative advisor’ and both there and in Nickel Boys I feel that Ross was too ready to indulge his instinct for cinematic experimentation. This could, of course, be seen as a matter of taste and it is only fair that I should point out that both of his feature films have many admirers who hail them as masterpieces. In each case I can recognise a sense of commitment to a substantial endeavour and Nickel Boys has a weight to it that stems from that. But, if the techniques supplied sometimes add to the impact, I think that they often also distract and when certain approving critics add that Nickel Boys is a film which will reward repeated viewings I am left with the feeling that what is really being said is that too often it lacks clarity and has scenes which leave one puzzled (there are for example brief shots of a crocodile which turns up first in a street scene and then inside Nickel). Furthermore, even if the two leading players, Herisse and Turner, do well and if the personal viewpoint shots often leave an impression, I don't think that it is by chance that, along with Jimmie Fails in the role of a sympathetic teacher, it is Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother who touches the audience most and does so by entirely traditional means.
Nickel Academy is I understand based on a real establishment, the Dozier School for Boys, which was closed down in 2011 after abuse there became public knowledge. In his film Ross shows that element but chooses not to emphasise it to the degree that films about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland have highlighted such behaviour. That may seem an unexpected choice but it also seems apt because the suffering inflicted there on inhabitants who appear to have been largely black is seen in Nickel Boys as part of a wider injustice borne by them. Whatever my reservations about the style of filming adopted here, I can say that Nickel Boys, like 2016’s Moonlight, speaks in real depth of what it means on a daily basis to be growing up in the USA as an African American.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Gralen Bryant Banks, Jimmie Fails, Fred Hechinger, Craig Tate, Sara Osi Scott, Tanyell Waivers, Ethan Cole Sharp, Daveed Diggs.
Dir RaMell Ross, Pro Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, David Levine and Joslyn Barnes, Screenplay RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on the book by Colson Whitehead, Ph Jono Fray, Pro Des Nora Mendis, Ed Nicholas Monsour, Music Alex Somers and Scott Alario, Costumes Brittany Loar.
Orion Pictures/Plan B Entertainment/Anonymous Content/Louverture Films-Curzon Films Distributors/Amazon MGM Studios.
140 mins. USA. 2024. US Rel: 13 December 2024. UK Rel: 10 January 2025. Cert. 12A.
