Director: RaMell Ross Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Gralen Bryant Banks, Fred Hechinger, Jimmie Fails Running Time: 140 minutes
One of the complaints often levelled at film critics’ choices for films that they collectively hail as ‘a masterpiece’ is their tendency to choose films that are formally and technically outstanding, but emotionally cold and impenetrable, with wider audiences struggling to forge a real connection to the material or how it’s showcased. It is a criticism that was frequently levelled at Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest last year, a film many said dealt with hugely emotional subject matter in an unemotional way. The legitimacy of this criticism aside, it is something I thought of multiple times while watching RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, a film whose artistic and stylistic innovation is wholly matched by a deep emotional resonance at its heart. This is a film, I thought, designed for people to forge a deep connection with it.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead and set in the 1960s, Nickel Boys follows the lives of Elwood and Turner, two Black teenagers from the American South who have been sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys in Florida, which itself is based on the real-life Dozier Reform School. Life at Nickel, as it was at Dozier, is unyieldingly bleak. Students are segregated by race, with the treatment of Black students being markedly worse. The standard of education for Black students is poor, they are forced into unpaid labour, their leisure activities are extremely limited, and if they step out of line in any way, they are subject to severe beatings or, in some cases, are taken ‘out back’ and are never seen or heard from again.
The film, like the novel, juxtaposes the perspectives of Turner and Elwood, whose lives and upbringings colour their very different outlook on their forced attendance at Nickel. Elwood (Ethan Herisse), who is from nearby Tallahassee, is an academically-gifted, socially-conscious high school student whose accomplished grades earn him the opportunity to study at the first all-Black university in the South. However, while hitchhiking for his first day of classes, he is picked up by an older Black man who is then pulled over by police for stealing the car he is driving and Elwood, as an accessory, is punished by being sent to Nickel. Despite his circumstances and the obvious prejudice that has led to his situation, Elwood’s strong sense of morality helps him remain positive in the face of adversity. He stands up for a younger boy who is being sexually harassed by older students, and endures a beating at the hands of Spencer, the school disciplinarian, for his trouble. He also takes copious notes of all of the mistreatment suffered by the students in a notebook, believing that his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and their lawyer will free him from his bondage there and exact justice on his tormentors.
Turner, on the other hand, is a runaway child of an alcoholic mother from Houston whose long incarceration at Nickel has made him cynical, driven purely by survival instincts and a desire to play others to his own advantage. We see how their opposite viewpoints draw them to each other from the beginning, with Turner mystified but energised by Elwood’s headstrong belief in the system, and Elwood growing a clearer understanding about the reality of their situation from Turner’s insider knowledge.
Adapting a great and important novel as Ross is here can be a challenging task, and even moreso when the director is seeking a prism for cinematic experimentation. Barry Jenkins chose to adapt Whitehead’s previous novel, The Underground Railroad, into an expansive and beautifully-staged miniseries for Amazon in order to allow the story the breathing room he thought it required. Strangely, Ross condenses the content of the novel rather than expanding upon it, but the manner in which he conveys the spaces between is what pushes this film from an inventive work of adaptation into a truly groundbreaking and potentially important touchstone of twenty-first century film.
While the novel plays out in a fairly standard third-person narrative (a perspective which is essential for the important reveal at the end), Ross instead employs a breathtaking, shifting first-person perspective in the film, with the point-of-view of the camera alternating between Elwood and Turner and, at times, to a slightly-removed, over-the-shoulder perspective when we jump forward to Older Elwood in the 2010s. Rather than watching the stories of Elwood and Turner play out, we live them, we see their world through their eyes. Ross uses short, contained scenes to tell the story, with the effect being as if we are accessing brief glimpses into the memories of their adult minds. We see and feel Elwood’s hope, Turner’s anger, Older Elwood’s pain, all in a highly-experiential manner that draws us closer to the characters, even though we only get the shortest of glances into their lives. Cinematographer Jomo Fray’s framing of these vignettes is heartbreaking and beautiful in equal measure, the camera doing all of the work of emotionally-investing us in these two characters and the friendship which helps them through their torment.
Ross doesn’t hover too long on any one conversation or memory of Elwood and Turner’s, but he effectively condenses the hefty plot of the novel down by carefully choosing these memories and filling in the gaps with TV and film clips, pieces of music, newspaper clippings, photographs (both real and fictionalised), and other contextual media which allow us as viewers to draw our own conclusions without holding our hands the entire way. One effective example is how Ross shows us the fate of a character called Griff (Luke Tennie) after a crucial boxing match by cutting to Older Elwood reading an article about investigations into Nickel Academy. It’s an example of a choice that speaks to the director’s confidence in his audience, asking them to meet the film on its own terms and rewarding them richly for doing so.
For an Irish audience, it will speak to the horrific stories of Christian Brothers schools, and of course, of the Magdalene Laundries as recently shown in Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These, a reminder that the fictional narrative we are following was the lived reality for many young people and, for some, it was to be their cruel final fate. The final reveal of the film is, at it is in novel, utterly devastating, but it also precipitates a montage sequence where Ross imbues the film with such raw hope that it is almost overwhelming, and the very last shot is one which viewers will be left thinking about for a long time, both gut-wrenching and joyous in equal measure.
With awards season approaching, it is hard to tell whether this film will achieve any kind of recognition from voting bodies. An early prediction of mine is that the Directors’ Guild will look very favourably on Ross’ work here, though the dominance of other films like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winner Anora, Brady Corbet’s soon-to-be-released epic The Brutalist, and audience favourites such as Conclave and Wicked may mean that this convention-defying masterpiece may not receive the awards acclaim that it deserves. However, one certainty is that RaMell Ross has shown the world that he is a filmmaker with vision and ambition beyond trophies and standing ovations. This is a director discovering his own potential before our eyes, inventing his own rules of cinematic storytelling and not apologising for it, displaying a bravery that is rare in this era of studio interference and artists playing it safe. This is a film that I feel we will be looking back on in future generations as one of the greats of this decade. Nickel Boys needs no rewarding, all it needs is time.
(5 / 5)