NICKEL BOYS (RaMell Ross 2024)

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ETHAN HENRISSE, BRANDON WILSON IN NICKEL BOYS

A powerful reshuffling of Colson Whitehead's prizewinning novel

Award winning documentary filmmaker Ramell Ross has chosen to make his feature debut, an A24 film, a stylistically bold work that radically rearranges Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys on which it is based, using an evocative, poetic yet visceral method reminiscent of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. The story is about Elwood (Ethan Henrisse), an intelligent, motivated, college-age black boy inspired by Rev. King living in the Jim Crow South in 1963 who, hitching a ride to a summer college program unknowingly in a stolen car that gets apprehended by cops, gets penalized for this by being sent to a brutal reformatory called the Nickel Academy, based on a real place where many were beaten and died and were buried on the property in unmarked graves. His best friend there becomes the more experienced boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson). The reformatory has white and black boys, segretated and given different treatment. Eventually Elwood and Turner escape but both do not survive.

This place immediately brought to mind for me Sugarcane, a documentary I'd just watched about Catholic-run Native residential schools across Canada where native people were brutalized and eliminated also (in the US too). The high profile choice of this film for the New York Film Festival Main Slate last fall brought to mind two other NYFF films. Two years ago Elegance Bratton's autobiographical The Inspection, about being queer and rejected by his mother and joining the U.S. Marines was featured as the Closing Night Film; Nickel Boys was the 2024 NYFF's Opening Night one.

The radical-POV-shot nature of parts of Nickel Boys leads one to wonder if Ross, whose 2018 doc Hale County This Morning, This Evening that I saw and reviewed at New Directors/New Films was much admired, might have attended the 2015 NYFF and seen Lazlo Nemes' Son of Saul (presented as a NYFF Special Event), where a brief period at Auschwitz is depicted entirely as seen through the eyes of a prisoner. Is the Nickel Academy and Auschwitz too extreme an equivalency? Maybe; but in both cases the films are shot in a way to make the terrifying experience of brutal incarceration more visceral through shooting as if seen through the eyes of a prisoner. Perhaps the NYFF jury was drawn to these three films for similar reasons.

The contrast between Whitehead's book and the screenplay by RaMell Ros and Joslyn Barnes is stark, because the book, except for some shifting back and forth in time, is strighbforward and linear, so deliberately understated and in such surprisingly correct standard English it reads a bit like a Young Adult novel, until thihgs go brutally wrong. Peter Debruge in his Telluride Variety review poses the obvious question; do Ross' radical devices, as he puts it "turning a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a minimalist tone poem," not perhaps achieve identificiton at the loss of a plot you can follow - unless you've read the book beforehand?

But Ross' super-empathic POV method avoids the risk of over-familiarity, because as Debruge points out citing films as diverse as Boy A, Zero for Conduct, Scum and Sleepers, brutality in boys' reformatories has been done often in the movies. It might have seemed clichéd to transfer Whithead's book literally to the screen, even though in novel form, the details are impactful. In the film, Ross gets around the problem of the invisibility of his main POV protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse) when at the Nickel Academy he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), and we get Turner's POV too. But whether seeing actor Herisse's face provides much additional emotional depth is uncertain, and the boy's idealism, made clear in the book's narrative, is lost also. But the scary, visceral effect Ross achieves reflects his strong background as a documentarian.

Sometimes, as Debruge puts it, the film version gets a bit "lost in digressions," including flash-forwards, arthival footage of NASA missions, and later forensic excavations at Nickel Academy that reveal the many unmarked graves. However, the visceral present-tense moments hold the lion's share of the attention, and grip the emotions as a more faithful adaptation would not have done.

While the critical rating revealed by Metacritic has been through-the-roof, there were dissenters at the New York Film Festival press screenings. Mike D'Angelo recently tellingly checked off three points on his 20-item checklist of things that can make him pan a movie: 1. "Solicits pity for agency-deprived victims, does little else," 2. "Source material's greatness is intrinsic to its original medium," and 3. "Overly enamored of stupid camera tricks." D'Angelo's actual review text acknowledges that he would"reluctantly" give Nickel Boys "a thumbs up in a Siskel/Ebert format" to acknowledge Ross' "undeniable talent," but he thinks first-person camera doesn't really work even in a "situation for which it's ideally suited" and is even "anti-cinema." This is debatable. One wonders if D'Angelo saw the film in a movie theater. Swallowed up by the big screen, despite all my reservations, I was gripped and enthralled. This is a powerful film. My companioin for the San Francisco screening, who didn't grow up in this country but recently became a US citizen, thanked me for bringing him because he felt Nickel Boys enlarged his understanding of our history in a significant way. It can do this also for young Americans; for all of us.

Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whithead's The Nickel Boys, 140 mins., debuted at Telluride Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at the NYFF late Sept. and Loondon BFI mid-Oct. Reviewed here as part of the NYFF, where it is the Opening Night Film, presented Fri., Sept. 27, 2024. US theatrical release Oct 25, 2024 by Amazon MGM Studios. UK Nov. 8. Metacritic rating 86%, then 84%, later 89%, and currently, after seeing it in San Francisco's Kabuki Theater Jan. 5, 2025, 91%. In a recent GoldDerby ranking of top Oscar hopefuls Nickel Boys ranked #9. The other ten in order were: 10. The Substance, 8. A Real Pain, 7. Sing Sing, 6. Dune, Part Two, 5. Emilia Pérez, 4. Wicked, 3. Conclave, 2. The Brutalist, and 1. Anora.x