Some films ooze brilliance as they demand to be seen. Thanks to cutting edge visuals and storytelling techniques, RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys based on the Pulitzer Prize novel has high chances of being a show stopper. This eases into Wentz’s character led story featuring two Black boys, Elwood and Turner, growing up in Florida during the height of segregation. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a young boy with great ideals who is falsely sent to the harsh Nickel Academy juvenile school. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the caring friend he finds during those dark and harsh times. “Nickel Boys” has the unusual power of both reconciling fully with the shoes of these Black teenagers while maintaining intensity in their history.
This is a brutal film that does not mince words when explaining it’s story. Most of the action cutting back and forth between Briton and Elwood Jomo Fray who is very talented Director of Photography, along with Ross focuses on education who and Black perspective how is it possible. If one doesn’t comprehend what is taught in the film, the blame only lies with oneself, not the film.
This strategy is indeed the same bold and brave approach that Ross used in his documentary feature film ‘Hale County This Morning, This Evening.’ The film had a similar premise of inviting the viewer to empathise with the day to day life happenings of a Southern Black town. However, the retooling of that desire, here in a fictional realm, one that the director has not really engaged with prior, is wholly fraught with risk. “Nickel Boys,” a work that is expertly integrated visually and performance wise whilst being a compelling story, certainly is worth the challenge.
It is worth noting that the film has flashes of optimism in the character of Elwood Curtis, who is depicted in the juvenile stage by Ethan Cole Sharp. Elwood’s life is propelled by emotions especially the love of his grandmother Hattie (a spectacular Aunjanue Ellis Taylor) while she is on the road earning a living. Elwood might be aware that times are tough, but the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the entire Civil Rights movement had offered him hope that the harrowing days for blacks were over.
Nor does his grandmother or his teacher Mr. Hill, a former Freedom Rider who is portrayed by Jimmy Fails, manage to dispel this concept. Quite the opposite: every school has funds only for schools and training centers, so he is the one to tell about a school that permits high school students to attend classes. Elwood uses a lift from a stranger to whom he is unaware has taken a car without permission and on his way to the school. Thanks to the police they caught the two, police considers Elwood an accomplice, and he is sent to Nickel.
Although he received strong encouragement from his grandmother not to lose hope, this does not help Elwood at Nickel where rather genial scenery hides the terror within the massive fortifications. If not for the emergence of Turner, you get the sense that Elwood would have quickly perished in such unforgiving surroundings. His loving and compassionate gaze is how we watch Elwood. Sometimes the camera switches between them, other times it ever so briefly watches them before looking elsewhere. Herisse and Wilson, both young actors, have a rather crucial role in connecting the emotional tone of the motion picture. Though they hardly appear together in the scenes physically, one could sense the presence of each within the eyes, facial expressions and postures of each other as captured in the shots.
In a film that will not take the troubles of the viewer and does not seek to elicit sympathy towards the characters, it instead expects the audience to do so because the boys are boys, as these performers do, the audience cannot really break their gaze away. Also, the documentary style, which fast forwards the film decades forward until we see the older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) shot from behind, prevents us from the sort of oppressive racial implant that only eases in this day and age. Also, the usage of archival footage like black and white photographs of Black bush boys, children of Black ethnicity seeming to celebrate a holiday, and sights of Apollo 8 also shift how we engage with the white dominated historical narratives that the documentary is engaging.
Ross and the Fray screenwriter Joslyn Barnes’s writerly work, as well as her writing with Ross, is nothing short of admirable. They take what seems to be nothing short of an impossible book to adapt and take the relaxed rhythmic style of Whitehead and turn it into a movie which spectacularly visualizes imagery that would otherwise be simply beautiful to an overwhelming extent. Many sequences reside in the intersection of beauty and sadness: the adult Elwood meeting on a bar with a Nickel former prisoner; warm embraces received on the lap from Hattie; vast areas of orange orchards with even little Black children sent to sea on those very fields. In every shot of “Nickel Boys” there is not only an environment in which the depth of specific moment is placed: the weight of its opacity, the heat of adhesive odor, the texture of rough surfaces, bulky and coarse. It is that amalgamation of the layers of the dusty external world with the insides that gives this perspective a new dimension. It is practically no longer a paranoid stylistic device; it is a matured experience in which everything that has been built up and shaken off for so many years of cinematic language is constructed.
The politics of the film, too, come under similar turmoil. Elwood is convinced that any barrier can be broken by means of determination of the kind that does not advocate violence during demonstrations. Turner, however, does not share such a belief; he is pensive and an optimist who is a realist.
He considers that the answer is quite simply mere existence. Their relationship is similar to that of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in a film of combined racial struggles, “The Defiant Ones,” which is referenced in “Nickel Boys” on several occasions. That particular film, certainly, is the product of the white American directors’ fantasies. It suggests that perhaps the question of racism may be resolved through understanding and a little sacrifice from the black male. From such false hopes, ‘Nickel Boys’ does not suffer. Liberation is a difficult process. And ‘Nickel Boys’ understands that there is no freedom without a struggle to attain it.
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