In Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ film whose artistic and stylistic innovation is wholly matched by a deep emotional resonance at its heart, form and function come together to provide the viewer with an invaluable perspective. The camera is mostly placed within the point of view of the film’s two lead characters, the principled and inspired Elwood, and the more cynical survivor Turner, as they take in the abuses and neglect of the Nickel Academy reform school. We see a warm upbringing before Nickel and the efforts to process the place afterwards, always seen through the eyes of the characters we come to know so well is this emotional and empathetic encounter.
Shots have a shallow depth of field, a soft focus, camera movements drift and drop as ‘eyes’ pick up on details that stick out in the boys’ mind and memory. It’s central to the way Ross tells this story, a creative choice he’s described as ‘sentient perspective’, that intrinsically ties seeing to self. The p.o.v. helps the film “to let us as viewers live life concurrently with Elwood and Turner, to be in their same present moment, to be inside their body”, as described by Nickel Boys cinematographer Jomo Fray to the New York Times. The film’s leads Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse acted also as camera operators in certain sequences, rigged up to provide their characters’ eyes, often swapping out with Fray on set.
A photographer and academic as well as a filmmaker, Ross’ intent to give a perspective to Elwood and Turner, and the real-life victims of institutionalised racial violence that they represent, is threaded throughout the film, and is key to his ethos as a creative. For his debut feature, documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, the director’s goals in his production manifesto were “to instantiate a way of looking”; to “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” It’s an ambition that crystallizes in his latest film to beautiful effect, what could be a gimmick becomes, as writer Aisha Harris described it, “a unique dramatic utility, carving out a new cinematic approach to not only looking at but seeing Black characters on screen.”
When he isn’t shooting through Elwood and Turner’s eyes, Ross shows clips, reels and footage from America’s past to both contrast and colour in the characters’ worldview. The space race. Martin Luther King speeches. Evidence photos of unmarked graves. And movie scenes. Specifically, scenes from Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.
Released in 1958, The Defiant Ones starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as chained fugitives on the run across the Deep South, “a black man chained to a white man…trying to escape from the law and each other!” per the posters. Praised in its day, with Poitier becoming the first African American to receive an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance, the film is referenced in Colson Whiteheads’ novel of The Nickel Boys, and in the film we’re shown both an extended clip on its own, and a scene of an older Elwood watching, quoting Poitier and his powerful, imposing voice.
Speaking to Little White Lies, Ross explained the significance of The Defiant Ones within his own film as a “fraught story, and what a bizarre paradigm for racial relations – or a bizarre exploration of racial relations – it was for that time”. Nickel Boys stands as a more fresh and complex examination of anti-Blackness in the United States, but Ross sees the idealistic 50s film as something that would inform the worldview of his lead character. A landmark film from Elwood’s childhood, with the striking sight of Sidney’s Noah Cullen, confidently crooning in the back of a prison van, we can understand why that might stick in his mind’s eye, even if the film is undoubtedly dated today. Ross also mentioned in that interview how young actor Ethan Herisse, who plays Elwood, so strongly resembles Sidney Poitier, and how that weaves into his film’s aims and aesthetics.
In the exceptional The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin’s book-length essay of film criticism, the writer and civil rights activist was matter-of-factly damning about the “genuinely well-meaning” The Defiant Ones. For starters, he saw Poitier’s role as overshadowing Tony Curtis, the story and the film’s entire message to an incredible degree:
“…his performance, which lends the film its only real distinction, also, paradoxically, smashes it to pieces. There is no way to believe both Noah Cullen and the story. With the best will in the world, it is virtually impossible to watch Tony Curtis while Sidney is on the screen, or, with the possible exception of Lon Chaney Jr., anyone else. It is impossible to accept the premise of the story, a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the hatred between black and white.”
The sentimental story, where Poitier and Curtis inevitably discover that they’re not so different, ultimately undercuts Poitier’s character; when Noah Cullen nobly sacrifices his own freedom to save ‘Joker’ Jackson in the film’s climax, we’re supposed to cheer for the common ground they’ve now found, returning to bondage (at best). They may be doomed, but at least now they embrace each other’s humanity. We are not supposed to unpack the film’s implication that if Joker cannot be free, Noah shouldn’t be either, but Baldwin balked at how for Poitier, “the unmistakable truth of his performance was being placed at the mercy of a lie”, not only a waste of his talents but a perversion of them.
The roots of racism aren’t found in the petty bickering and stubborn ignorance that are found and forgiven in The Defiant Ones, or more modern morality tales like Crash and Green Book. The Racist actively embodies their anxieties into the Other, an empty vessel for them to pour cruelty into; an easier, opportunistic and aggressive way of putting distance between themselves and the causes of their unhappiness. Racism is not caused by ignorance so much as it provides a facilitator for ignorance. We see it now unnervingly often in Ireland, where political disenfranchisement and social alienation create the conditions for migrants, refugees and people of colour to be hatefully targeted.
We see it in Nickel Boys too, where Hamish Linklater as Nickel’s administrator commits horrific acts of violence, safely insulated from oversight, a participant in a collective delusion from people in power that a place like the academy would be helpful even if it wasn’t being used as a hiding place for evil. When the white men in Nickel Boys are confronted with the humanity of the young Black men they’re tied to, they don’t embrace them, they kill them.
What’s interesting is that the image in The Defiant Ones that most gave away the film’s shortcomings in Baldwin’s opinion is an inverse of the ‘sentient perspective’ of Nickel Boys. It’s also a point of view shot, but one where Baldwin notes that the film “suggests the truth it can neither face nor articulate”. He might describe it in Ross’ verbiage as an image shot at, not from. Stumbling across Curtis and Poitier brawling, a young white boy with a gun is disarmed by the duo, who accidently knock him unconscious in the process. When the boy revives, he looks up at Poitier’s face, and the camera shifts to the boy’s point of view. Per Baldwin we see it “as the boy sees it: black, unreadable, not quite in focus – and, with a moving, and, as I take it, deliberate irony, this image is the single most beautiful image in the film”. The boy is terrified and scrambles to Curtis for safety.
We’re supposed to take Curtis’ reassurance to the boy that Poitier is no threat to him as a pivotal turning point, an emotional growth on the white man’s part that his counterpart now owes him in return, say, by jumping off an escaping train to save him. He has overcome his own fear of that Black face, described by Baldwin as “vaguely, but mightily threatening, partly because of its strangeness and privacy, but also because of its beauty; that beauty which lives so tormentedly in the eye of the white beholder”. The perspective of the boy, when it’s embodied by the viewer, is actively insentient: despite all the tribulations the film has shown Cullen go through, despite the dignity and decency etched into Poitier’s expression, we understand what the camera is trying to capture here: fear.
In his writings on power, race and sexuality, James Baldwin was a man with a captivating perspective himself, blunt and unblinkingly brutal when discussing cruelty and inequality, but always routed in his own tenderness, his appreciation for the beauty that does exist in the world, despite it all. In novel If Beale Street Could Talk, he wrote “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass”, and in the film adaptation by Barry Jenkins we see both the poignancy and defiance of beauty remaining visible through confinement, Jenkins’ more emotionally heightened close ups of faces serving Baldwin’s appreciation of beauty. Nickel Boys is similarly seminal in what it chooses to see.
Sweetly, although somewhat awkwardly, last month Karen Kramer, the widow of The Defiant Ones director Stanley, awarded Nickel Boys the ‘Karen & Stanley Kramer Social Justice Award’ at the African American Film Critics Association Awards, in recognition of the way that the film spotlights the abuse suffered by generations of boys at the real life Dozier School for Boys reform school in Florida, and other such institutions throughout the United States. Kramer was effusive in her praise for Ross’ achievement, in particular for the empathy that comes from the sentient perspective:
Ross’ film reasserts the overwhelming impact of the moving image by stretching the “rules” of visual storytelling and serving audiences an utterly unique vision. With that vision, the political becomes the personal as Ross seizes on a revolutionary way of telling the story of horror and injustice first committed to the page by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead. Both works, film and novel, expose the tragedy of the Dozier School for Boys, giving voice to the nameless murdered children whose remains, and even childhood toys, were found in unmarked graves on the property in 2016.
What Elwood and Turner see, and how they see it, is hopeful in spite of horrors, traumatised despite survival, a grounded and genuine and thorough experience in seeing from. In using their fiction to open eyes to true injustices, and in adding something so beautifully new to American filmmaking, they provide an invigorating expression of defiance.
