It’s worth starting this review by saying I have read the Colson Whitehead novel Nickel Boys
is based on, and very recently. In fact, it was the rapturous festival reactions to the film, many of which emphasized it as an achievement of adaptation, that inspired me to seek out the book ahead of time. I’m glad I did – it’s a wonderful book. Having read it, however, did shape my response to this movie.
RaMell Ross, who directed and co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes, has created an adaptation in intelligent conversation with its source. Without giving too much of either work away, it’s easy to see how the film’s defining stylistic choice – shooting as if from a character’s point of view – fits this material. Nickel Boys is thoughtful and gave me a lot to think about. But I have reservations, and though I’ll never know, I do wonder if my feelings would have been as tempered had I seen the film first.
Nickel Boys Gets Ambitious With Its Non-Linear, Point-Of-View Filmmaking
The Fictional Story Never Loses Its Truthfulness
Much like the novel, Nickel Boys is fiction woven from fact. Nickel Academy, the Florida boys reform school where much of the story takes place, didn’t exist, nor did the characters of Elwood and Turner, who serve as our focal points. But the Dozier School for Boys, the institution that inspired it, did, as did its victims. The film is very cognizant of this, and even if we don’t know the background going in, so is the audience. That might be what makes Ross, a documentarian making his first narrative feature, uniquely suited to this material.
The film he’s made is more impression than document. Nickel Boys exists in three sections, and as mentioned, the vast majority of it is filmed as if through a character’s eyes. We begin in 1950s and ’60s Tallahassee with Elwood Curtis (Ethan Cole Sharp as a boy and Ethan Herisse as a teen), seeing snippets of his life as a Black child in the Jim Crow era through his POV. We see his parents briefly and never learn what happened to them, except that they’ve left; Elwood is raised by his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor).
The film camera has the tendency to convey a sort of omniscience, especially in movies shot and edited to make us forget it’s even there, but Ross undercuts that by grounding us in specific viewpoints.
Elwood is bright and observant. His teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), was a Freedom Rider and recognized a spark in his student. As Elwood’s interest in civil rights grows, Mr. Hill recommends he take advantage of a local Black college opening up classes to high-achieving high schoolers. On his first day, he hitches a ride and learns the hard way he’d unknowingly hopped into a stolen car. So, this (as one cop puts it) “bona fide car thief” gets sent to Nickel.
There he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and our little circle of access grows as we add his point of view to our visual repertoire. We experience Nickel through their time there. Turner, quick and charismatic, is a studied hand at the Academy, and tries to take Elwood under his wing. The two become friends, though their worldviews clash – where Elwood wants to stand up against the injustices of this place, Turner is cynically accepting of them. He insists life inside is no different from life outside; people are just more honest with their cruelty here.
Finally, interwoven with this latter half are scenes from the future, as an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) makes his way through life, long gone from Nickel’s walls but never out of its long shadow. These aren’t quite filmed as point-of-view shots anymore, but from just behind Elwood’s head, as if the camera was mounted on his shoulders. Or as if we are standing just behind him, forever an uncomfortably close companion.
Nickel Boys Leans On Its Visual Style To Intriguing Effect
And Knows When To Subvert It
There is a brilliance to the visual language that Ross establishes. In the novel, Whitehead places his characters within a tapestry of experience that they can’t see, but which we have frequent access to. Elwood and Turner’s sections are just the ones we study most closely. Through this managing of perspective, we can see the historical vastness of something so painfully individual without losing our sense of either scope.
Nickel Boys achieves this by limiting our perspective, rather than expanding it. The film camera has the tendency to convey a sort of omniscience, especially in movies shot and edited to make us forget it’s even there, but Ross undercuts that by grounding us in specific viewpoints. We are aware, as we share the specificities of Elwood and Turner’s lives at Nickel, that there are hundreds of others we could be seeing. In place of context, we get pregnant ellipses. Instead of showing us scope, we’re compelled to imagine it.
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If I am to return to the wider world of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth, The War of the Rohirrim’s approach seems to me an ideal way to go about it.
This approach also sets itself up to be effectively subverted. The film’s imagery is dotted with surreal touches, whether through unannounced dreams or visions, as well as intrusions of archival footage. Some of these can actually be pieced together once the narrative concludes, but others open themselves to multiple readings. The execution of a particularly distressing moment of violence, especially, is a scene that will stick with me from this year in film.
Sometimes I felt a strange kinship between Nickel Boys and last year’s The Zone of Interest, despite their having virtually opposite aesthetic approaches to similarly difficult subject matter. Both seem to trust in their structures to make their point — until they don’t. In key moments, the filmmakers reach across time to puncture the barriers of form they’ve created and their voices, perspectives, and emotions rush in. As if the past and present cannot, or should not, be kept apart.
Nickel Boys’ Key Aesthetic Strategy Is Also My Point Of Contention
It’s A Stroke Of Adaptational Genius That Also Fails The Novel
These breaks from pure point-of-view were pretty consistently the most moving for me – and therein lies my difficulty with Nickel Boys. This POV filmmaking is more alienating than it is immersive, and there’s value in being pushed away from the narrative and encouraged to think through what we’re being shown. But I spent too high a percentage of those thoughts on the formal conceit, rather than its content.
One of the wonders of the source material is that it doesn’t have to choose between an emotional reader and a politically conscious one.
Ross sometimes goes out of his way to show us our perceiver’s reflection, a contortion that wouldn’t be necessary without this self-imposed framework. There is a falseness to the camera’s unbroken, steady gaze that I found distracting, never more so than in the critical scene when Elwood and Turner first exchange words. We see this moment twice, first from Elwood’s POV and then from Turner’s, but in that second go, Elwood is mostly shown looking awkwardly down at his oatmeal. A strong acting choice, perhaps, but one that only highlights the artifice at play here.
I believe I would have felt that way if I’d walked into the movie cold, but having read the book did this reaction of mine no favors. One of the wonders of the source material is that it doesn’t have to choose between an emotional reader and a politically conscious one. Emotional accessibility is one of its most potent critical tools. Nickel Boys understands this at some level, and there are crucial moments that allow Ellis-Taylor’s performance to shine through. But, great though she is, her work stands out because of how rarely this happens for anyone else.
Nickel Boys is the kind of film art that can sustain the weight of the many reviews, essays, and theses to be written about it, and those aren’t to be dismissed. Even this conflicted critic can’t deny it as one of the strongest films of the year, and I encourage everyone to see it when they can. But I did miss what was lost in the journey from page to screen.
Nickel Boys will release in limited theaters in New York City on Friday, December 13 and in Los Angeles on Friday, December 20, with plans for a wide release in early January. The film is 140 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking.
8/10
Nickel Boys
- Intelligently & ambitiously adapts its Pulitzer Prize-winning source material
- Features some of the year’s most striking moments
- At its strongest when subverting its own visual language
- Sacrifices the novel’s emotionality for its ideas
- POV conceit didn’t always work for me as intended