Review
Nickel Boys shows how Black people see themselves, and how their experience is shaped by the way others see them.

In his review of 2003’s Billy Bob Thorton comedy Bad Santa, Roger Ebert pointed out that cinematic style is more fundamental than subject matter. “A movie is not about what it is about,” he wrote, “but about how it is about it.”

Sometimes, however, as with the new film Nickel Boys, the question is why a movie is about it that way. In other words, why did director RaMell Ross choose to tell the story of a Jim Crow-era reform school in Florida using only POV shots? Why use this style to tell this story this way?

Filmed entirely in first-person perspective, as if the camera itself is the main character, Nickel Boys is a formally audacious adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s more narratively straightforward, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (titled The Nickel Boys) from 2019. Thus, as with his debut feature documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross approaches Nickel Boys as an experiment in point of view. It’s a film about how Black people see themselves, and how their experience is shaped by the way others see them.

Growing up in the early 1960s, protagonist Elwood Curtis (played by newcomer Ethan Herisse) is a bright young man who idolizes Martin Luther King, Jr. His teachers nudge him toward greater opportunities like a scholarship to a historically Black college. Elwood’s idealism in the fight for civil rights represents optimism about the future of the Black community in the South. But his plans are waylaid when he is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets picked up by the police, convicted of being an accessory to a crime he had nothing to do with, and sent off to Nickel Academy, a state-run reform school for juvenile delinquents.

Nickel Boys movie review
For much of the film, we only ever see Elwood (Ethan Herisse) when he is reflected in a mirror or window. Amazon MGM Studios

At Nickel, Elwood is befriended by Jack Turner (played by another newcomer, Brandon Wilson), a more cynical young man whose experience of racial oppression prevents him from believing things will ever change. Elwood was brought up to believe in Black pride and to stand up for himself and for his people, but Turner argues that such idealism won’t work in a place like Nickel Academy where courage is met with bald-faced brutality. “In here and out there are the same,” Turner says, “but in here no one has to act fake anymore.” Elwood replies, “If everyone looks the other way, then everybody’s in on it. If I look the other way, I’m as implicated as the rest.”

Once Elwood begins keeping careful notes of the conditions, documenting the forced labor, corporal punishment, corruption and abuse, it is only a matter of time before he collides with the powers that be. Nickel Academy is the kind of place there are only four ways out of: if it doesn’t kill you, you either get a reprieve from the corrupt court system, you do your time, or you run away. Of course, trying to escape through the dangerous Florida swamp is just as hopelessly inconceivable as being pardoned.

The first-person perspective experiment has been tried before in such films as The Lady in the Lake, a Philip Marlowe private-eye story from 1946 famously shot entirely in POV. That film comes off as gimmicky, perhaps because all the scenes are one long take with people talking directly to a mostly static camera. More recently, Hardcore Henry was a 2015 sci-fi/action take on the POV film, shot with a head-mounted GoPro video camera and edited to look like one continuous shot. Here the gimmick works better, but only because the adrenaline-fueled subject matter is familiar from first-person shooter video games.

The subjective point of view works better in Nickel Boys than in most other such experiments films because director RaMell Ross doesn’t try to shoot everything in long takes, but rather uses a collage of impressionistic images that suggest the feeling of being inside someone’s consciousness and seeing their memories. There are bits and fragments of TV footage and non-linear flash-forwards to the boys’ future life after Nickel Academy. At no point does the film look like someone carrying a camera around, nor does it ever feel like watching someone play a video game.

Nickel Boys movie review
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Hattie. Amazon MGM Studios

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way the point of view shifts back and forth from Elwood to Turner after they boys meet, so that the same scene is sometimes played out twice, once from each perspective. Before the boys meet, we only ever see Elwood when he is reflected in a mirror or window. It is as if Elwood is only able to truly see himself through the eyes of his friend. Then, during the flash-forwards, the POV shifts slightly to behind the adult Elwood’s head (now played by Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame), as though he is carrying the camera on his back — like the weight of his trauma hovering over him the rest of his life.

Why, then, does Ross shoot Elwood’s story this way? Perhaps he is exploring the way Black people today must see themselves in a world where Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X were murdered.

How can young Black people regain Elwood’s idealism and optimism in a world where the sins of the past are illegal to teach in many schools, and the powers that be do everything they can to keep the truth of Nickel Academy buried? Ross seems to suggest that the answer lies in learning to see through Elwood’s eyes.

Nickel Boys is a major work of art, for sure, even if I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while, and rewatching it soon.

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MORE INFO

Nickel Boys

2024 ● 2h 20min ● PG-13

Rating

65%

Genres

Drama

Studio(s)

Orion Pictures, Plan B Entertainment

Director

RaMell Ross

Director of Photography

Jomo Fray

Where to Watch

Nickel Boys

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