“Nickel Boys” - Film Review
In 2019, Colson Whitehead wrote what would win him his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Nickel Boys is a novel based on the Florida School for Boys, a reform school that operated in the panhandle of Florida for 111 years. A reform school was used as an alternative to prison for children and teenagers who committed a crime. As one could imagine, these reform schools were breeding grounds for violence, abuse, and cruelty. Many of the boys who ended up in places like the Florida School for Boys were sent there for reasons like smoking, skipping school, and trespassing. Whitehead’s novel has been adapted for the big screen by director RaMell Ross, who used a first-person-point-of-view style of filmmaking to place the audience within the confines of a reform school. Nickel Boys is a once-in-a-generation feat of filmmaking that is as urgent as it is long overdue.
Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a bookish student growing up in Tallahassee in the Jim Crow era. He’s encouraged by one of his teachers (Jimmie Fails) to attend classes at a local college that allows high school students to enroll tuition free. While walking to the college, he’s offered a ride by a stranger who has stolen the car he’s driving. The police believe Elwood is the man’s accomplice, so Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school. The only boy at the school to show kindness to Elwood is Turner (Brandon Wilson). The two become inseparable, relying on each other to survive the brutalities doled out by the school’s director (Hamish Linklater). While the majority of Nickel Boys takes place in the 1960s when Elwood is at Nickel Academy, the film does jump forward in time to Elwood as an adult (Daveed Diggs) living in New York City and still reckoning with the reality of his past.
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It’s immensely difficult to pull off a film shot in the first person. It’s a little bit of a hurdle to get into the film because it’s a style that doesn’t have a lot of precedent. Once one allows the sensation of almost being seen by the film’s protagonists to wash over them, Nickel Boys becomes transcendent. The opening gives off a lofty, dreamlike impression of youth. The camera is imbued with the weightlessness of being young and carefree and the audience is along for the ride. We don’t see young Elwood, we are him. It’s a sensation that never grows old and it makes the audience feel as though they have stepped into the screen. Some may feel a coldness from this first-person style, but the film is asking the audience to watch a movie in a way that’s different from the way they are used to. In this age of streaming, where TV and movies are background noise to someone scrolling on their phone, Nickel Boys compels us to be an engaged participant. To lean in and listen intently. To make direct eye contact with the characters and be present for the story that is being told.
Nickel Boys, both the movie and the novel, speak to where we are in American history. The novel came out in 2019 in the middle of Trump’s first presidency. Now, the film adaptation comes out mere months before he takes office once again. All around the country, people are having conversations about what it means to be American and what this country stands for. Elwood and Turner are two sides of the same coin. They each see the brutal reality of the United States and have experienced it firsthand, but are at odds intellectually. What they were wrestling with in the 1960s is eerily similar to what we are struggling with now. Does the America that promises diversity, unity, and freedom for all exist? The one they believe can be better despite its past? Or are we just a nation built on cruelty, slavery, segregation, and other horrors? Bound to that identity forever, no matter how much we work to try to change it? Nickel Boys doesn’t have an answer for that. It’s a question that will only be realized in hindsight when it’s too late one way or the other, but we must continue to try to make a difference in the hope that our actions will have a lasting impact.
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Each scene of Nickel Boys feels like a memory, an imperfect glimpse of moments in time that have lingered in Elwood’s or Turner’s brain years after the fact. On their own, they work as self-contained vignettes, but together they create a story larger than themselves. The film has created such a rich text that the viewer wants to linger far longer than the movie will allow. The soundscape of Nickel Boys reinforces the haziness of memory. Certain sounds are striking, clearly cutting through the din, while others are impossible to discern. Our recollection of our life events can be fragmented, as Nickel Boys shows, but it is also impossible to forget certain things.
Nickel Boys could have been generic Oscar bait that was more interested in milking tragedies to get awards recognition, but instead it’s a quiet reflection. A return to moviegoing as an experience rather than merely a passive observation.
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