Nickel Boys

62nd New York Film Festival: Main Slate

Spoilers below. Proceed accordingly.

A decided improvement on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, which reads to me like someone writing about the past through the delusional haze of a Trumpian present. The prose is page-turnable, though the Jim Crow south setting, and the positioning of the two boys, Elwood and Turner, as philosophical opposites (the idealist and the cynic) feels contrived instead of lived-in. Then Whitehead drops some wrongheaded climactic twists that only curdle things further.

Diagnosing the issue, it appears the most popular literature of our day requires self-evident narrative contorting, a belabored framework by which we are assured exactly, at all points, how to feel. It isn’t enough to mine drama from the basics of death and/or survival, of merely existing moment by moment in a world that, if it doesn’t kill you in violent extremis instead saps your soul with boredom, tedium, malaise. Paradoxically, there can be allegorical and artistic blood in all this. But you must follow the lives you create. Not, as I believe Whitehead does, fabricate them.

Another paradox: RaMell Ross, co-writer/director of Nickel Boys, gets a good deal of the way there through an aesthetic contrivance — shooting almost the entirety of his film adaptation in subjective POV. First via Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp young, Ethan Herisse as a teen, Daveed Diggs as an adult) whose features we initially see only in reflection (on the shiny metal of an iron, in the foggy glass of a store window). And then, after he is imprisoned in the Florida-based Nickel Academy reform school, switching off regularly between the adolescent Elwood and his co-inmate Turner (Brandon Wilson) so that each boy gets some resonant face time…and much more besides.

The emotional effect of the toggling perspectives is extremely potent, primarily for the way it connects the boys at subtle psychic and spiritual levels. But additionally for how it complicates the representational qualities that undermine them on the page. Actually seeing the people — and both of the blissfully harmonized performers — allows them to feel more flesh and blood, and not so rigorously aligned with certain codes and principles. They live. In short.   

I frequently thought back to a wonderful moment in Ross’s 14-minute documentary Easter Snap (2019) in which one of the subjects, an Alabama hog processor, collapses unexpectedly. His friends rush to help him, as does Ross, who goes to assist after a brief pause, but only after putting his camera down on the ground. He doesn’t turn it off, of course, this being the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle instance non-fiction filmmakers dream of. We hear the offscreen commotion but see only blades of grass and the surrounding environs. The dichotomy couldn’t be more poetically perfect, nor the motives behind sound and image so ruminatively thorny. What does it mean to avert one’s gaze from suffering, yet still consciously capture it? And what is the morality of keeping the camera on in such a situation, even if at an oblique remove?

Nickel Boys is in similarly constant dialogue with itself, as well as in enduring search of moments that feel caught, even as they’re inevitably preconceived. A violent assault sequence, overseen by headmaster Spencer (Hamish Linklater), is affectingly conveyed via sidelong imagery, a teeth-grating soundtrack, and the interweaving of photographs documenting real-life atrocities and their aftermath that occurred at schools that inspired the fictional Nickel Academy. There are also several interludes with an intrusive alligator that feel conjured from a nightmarish, and very regionally and culturally specific, ether. And the third-person approach that Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray take in the Diggs sections of the film adeptly suggest how lingering traumas disembody people from their day-to-day. You watch yourself going through the motions, which is as pure an embodiment of hell on earth as there is.  

If Nickel Boys still doesn’t gel for me, it’s because Ross can’t help but treat Whitehead’s book as holy lit-adapt writ, regrettably veering toward the lachrymose as narrative takes primacy. There’s little that could be done to sell the reveals to which the story is building — a horrific death followed by a years-long assuming of a false identity that, if it was all to work, should have been woven into the full fabric of the tale rather than used to gasp-inducingly goose it. Whitehead at least tackled these disclosures head on. But Ross muddles them in Malick-like stream-of-consciousness. It plays confusingly onscreen, tossed-off in all the wrong ways, and leaves a sour aftertaste. Fantasy supplants reality instead of riding in tandem with it, something the film more often grasps and utilizes to its painful and poignant advantage.