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Nickel Boys
In Nickel Boys, which screened as the 2024 New York Film Festival’s opening night narrative feature, director RaMell Ross turns traditional camera perspective on its head. In this maverick, unique film about racial identity in the Jim Crow South, Elwood (Ethan Harisse) learns the hard facts about racism and rejects them, martyring himself.
Excelling in school, conscientiously raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood, through a stroke of horrible luck, ends up at reform school Nickel Academy. Through the terrible trials there, his friendship with Turner (Brandon Wilson) directs his destiny.
Ross employs personal POV, engaging us with camera angles that rarely show the lead character, Elwood. This approach shows Elwood’s coming-of-age story by melding the viewer with the character. Symbolically and thematically, the perspective resonates, immersing the viewer in Elwood’s experiences. We don’t see Elwood filtered through cultural images of beauty, as traditional film encourages us to do, distracting us with comparing actors and concentrating on their looks rather than their character.
The film also employs personal POV with Elwood’s friend Turner (Brandon Wilson) and adult Turner (Daveed Diggs). Ross and co-screenwriter Joslyn Barnes construct the film using flashback scenes as well as scenes in the present when Elwood runs a moving business in New York City, where he lives with his wife. After work, he pores over his computer reviewing archives. We only see the back of his head. However, as the film unspools between present and past, we gradually put the puzzle pieces together.
Based on Colson Whiteheads’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel
Based on the titular novel by Colson Whitehead, the film pays careful attention to details that convey point of view. For example, at times the camera concentrates on what appear to be extraneous objects. In the Q&A after the screening, Ross explained that when the characters receive scoldings and/or abuse, they don’t look into the faces of their abusers. Instead, they may look at their shirts, shoes, etc. The camera angle focuses on something else. Importantly, this “misdirection” points the viewer toward the frightened response of the victim, heightening the viewer’s upset because the sounds of someone punched and the groans relay the abuse without our seeing it.
In a fascinating twist, we don’t know what Elwood looks like until the director allows us to see Harisse well into the film. Not only does this POV astound and frustrate us, it forcefully displaces us as typical viewers, and creates suspense and involvement. Thus, we understand everything that happens to Elwood, his abuse by others, through his eyes. We experience his rejection and bullying from whites and Blacks alike. Also, through flashbacks from a young age, we experience his growing recognition of his demeaned racial identity in 1960s Florida.
Grandmother Hattie and Mr. Hill provide a well-drawn contrast
In contrast we also experience the love and warmth of Elwood’s grandmother Hattie, a bulwark who initially protects him from the pain and hate emanating from the culture. Through her response to Elwood, we feel her wisdom, grace and huge heart. We see her living the Christianity that helps her get through life’s travails. Her quiet activism, instructing Elwood in the ways of the Lord and introducing him to Martin Luther King Jr., hardens him against hatred and anger.
Rationality redirects Elwood from the prejudiced, violent culture. His teacher Mr. Hill assists him in becoming college-minded. Together Mr. Hill and Hattie’s uplifting attitude encourages Elwood’s hope that the culture can change. He realizes through Dr. King’s marches that African Americans have recourse – and thus that any situation can be combated with truth.
Reform School Tests Elwood’s beliefs
However, his beliefs are sorely tested at Nickel Academy. Hattie tries to get in touch with him there and hire a lawyer to combat the miscarriage of justice that jailed Elwood in the reformatory and petition to get Elwood out. Unable to meet Elwood, she runs into Turner, who passes information to Elwood. Though the two teenagers come from different backgrounds with different world views, they grow close. Nickel Academy abuses the boys there, working them for no pay and punishing them for few good reasons. The particularly virulent Spencer (Hamish Linklater), one of the headmasters, sadistically enjoys brutalizing the youngsters.
When Elwood shows Turner a booklet where he has written down the dates, times and places of various abuses by Spencer and others, he turns whistleblower. Turner tells him to be careful. Anyone who goes against Spencer and the others disappears. Undaunted, Elwood insists they use the journal to notify inspectors who can close down the institution. But his hopes and plans go awry, and Turner suggests another opportunity that must be taken before Spencer’s vengeance falls upon their heads.
A Tight Script
Ross and Barnes’ tight script that rocks its conclusion. A controversial ending leaves one stunne, and the POV cinematography, the gift that keeps on giving, is a vital part of the ending.
The extraordinary performances by the ensemble and especially Harisse, Wilson and Ellis-Taylor leave one impacted long after the lights come up. Nickel Boys must be seen a few times to understand “Ross’s extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s novel.” Thanks to his artistic genius and risk-taking this seminal work will surely be up for awards.
It’s screening at the 2024 New York Film Festival until October 9.
