Ed Halter
RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel upends popular formal conventions to create a powerful portrait of institutional violence and oppression.
Ethan Herisse as Elwood and Brandon Wilson as Turner in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross, now playing in theaters in New York City, opens in Los Angeles December 20, 2024
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An exceedingly rare and exceptionally successful instance of sustained formal experimentation in an American studio picture, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys not only relentlessly digs down into still-obscured memories of the inherited disaster we know as these United States but does so by reassembling the fundamental structures of popular cinema into something strange and new. Ross achieves this by using a predominantly first-person camera to retell the story of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, the writer’s award-winning 2019 novel based on the all-too-real history of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. The staff at this ostensible reform school, which operated for over a hundred years in the Florida Panhandle, tortured, raped, and murdered an untold number of Black teenagers sentenced to their care, burying young corpses in an unmarked corner of campus where they would not be discovered until the early years of the twenty-first century.
Ethan Herisse as Elwood in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
As in Whitehead’s tale, Nickel Boys relates the goings-on at Nickel Academy, a fictionalized version of the Dozier School, via the experiences of seventeen-year-old Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who is introduced to the audience at the film’s start through a woman’s voice calling his name over a blank screen. The first image centers on a close-up of a plump orange still growing on a bough (reminiscent of similarly luminous shots of orchard apples in Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s silent masterpiece Earth), then pans across and down to a lean, dark-skinned arm outstretched against the ground, framed from what the viewer immediately recognizes as Elwood’s point-of-view. His fingers pick lazily at fallen leaves and green grass as the sunlight streams. Even if the image initially resembles a first-person shooter’s view, we quickly realize that Ross intends to use this convention to portray contemplation and response rather than mere ludic action.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
Then follows a rapid rebus of shots for the viewer to decipher: an extreme close-up of a glittering gold bracelet on a wrist; glimpses of a card game played by looming adults, as if seen from a baby’s-eye view; a shot looking upward from the bottom of a Christmas tree as a joyful woman (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, soon identifiable in the role of Elwood’s grandmother Hattie) gently tosses tinsel from above; a shot looking up from the base of a jungle gym as a kid slips and falls. If these clues have yet to tip off the spectator, the camera soon captures a glimpse of a boy’s face reflected in an iron as it presses sheets from side to side. Hattie, dressed in a domestic’s uniform, sweeps dust from the floor then stands upright, looking squarely into the camera’s lens as she moves, smiling as if to say, silently, to her grandson, I see you.
Brandon Wilson as Turner in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
The film continues to witness Elwood’s maturation, through his own eyes, in the Jim Crow South during the middle of the civil rights era, all the way to the fateful day when a racist cop mistakenly arrests him on the highway while he’s traveling to attend college, ultimately resulting in his enforced enrollment at Nickel. There, amid its bucolic but crushingly carceral world, he meets his jaded classmate Turner (Brandon Wilson), who soon becomes a fast friend and Virgilian guide to the infernal institution. They first meet around a cafeteria table, where Turner defends the quiet Elwood from the verbal assaults of nearby bullies. After this incident, Ross suddenly shifts from Elwood’s point of view to Turner’s, reviewing the same scene again from the other teen’s perspective. For the remainder of the film, the camera’s POV flits between that of Elwood and Turner as their barracks-buddy bond grows, signifying their increasingly deep and complicated interconnectedness. At one point, Elwood defends Turner to Harper (Fred Hechinger), one of the younger white staff members, after Turner storms off in a huff. “What are you, his girlfriend?” Harper prods.
Brandon Wilson as Turner in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
The addition of Turner’s perspective partway through the movie is only one of Ross’s intricate maneuvers; as it proceeds, Nickel Boys begins to travel back and forth in time with the disjunctive agility of an Alain Resnais film, giving us views of Elwood’s adult life in New York, decades hence, as well as his reactions in 2018, when news media finally uncovers the truth about the reformatory and spread it across the internet. This revelation is foreshadowed by the insertion of historical images from the Dozier School, expressive bits of archival footage (news reports, home movies, the opening of Stanley Kramer’s 1958 prison-escape picture The Defiant Ones), intermingled with fabricated documents from the fictional universe. When Elwood finally experiences the institution’s violence firsthand, the camera switches to extreme close-ups of worn black-and-white photographs in which lineups of long-lost youths peer out from battered motes of emulsion, relieving the viewer from witnessing Nickel’s horrors directly. Whether these particular pictures are real or staged is unknowable in the moment, but the effect is as if reality had burst through the fiction without warning.
More subtly, the cinematography depicting Elwood’s viewpoint changes at the moment he experiences Nickel’s violent punishments: thereafter, the camera is poised not as if it equates with his eyes, but rather hovering above the back of his head, following his motions with GoPro fluidity. (The film’s director of photography is Jomo Fray.) This is the manner in which the adult Elwood moves through the world, through the perspective of an imaginary, internalized observer. It’s an arresting device, both visually disorienting and metaphorically potent, immediately calling to mind DuBois’s concept of “double consciousness” from The Souls of Black Folk, an ultimately ineffable “twoness” that the thinker attempted to define as that “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Tellingly, one of the first times we see this dissociated camera-self is when the adult Elwood reads news websites detailing his classmates’ exhumations, witnessing himself re-witnessing these sufferings and indignities as they are simultaneously made visible to the entire networked world.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Hattie and Ethan Herisse as Elwood in Nickel Boys. Courtesy Orion Pictures. © Amazon Content Services.
For all its disturbing nature, Nickel Boys unsettles primarily through indirection, suggestion, and lyrical montage. It is uninterested in depicting violence explicitly, but instead intent on studying the atmospheres that such oppression sustains. Neither slavery nor prisons are seen in Nickel Boys, and yet both are everywhere, and not only in the obvious extension of these institutions through the false reformatory front of Nickel Academy. Escaping physical imprisonment is one thing, the film seems to say; finding release from our mental prisons will be quite another.
Ed Halter is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all its forms in Brooklyn, New York, and Critic in Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.