
In director RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, we’re denied the whole picture in more ways than one. First, there’s the literal sense of visual deprivation: Ross shot the movie in the square 1:37:1 aspect ratio, meaning it leaves voids of black space on both sides of the movie screen. Secondly, for a film that is inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys — a horrific reform school in the Florida Panhandle, whose mental and physical abuses led to potentially 100 or more deaths in its century of existence — much of its horrors are left to our imagination. Rather than showing them to us in harrowing 4K, its setting’s unspeakable cruelties are suggested through vague glances in forbidden rooms, or through whispered secrets exchanged like contraband.
That’s because Ross’ approach, radical and experiential, precludes us from escaping the eyesockets of its two protagonists. He shot Nickel Boys (the movie jettisons the “the” in Whitehead’s title) as a first-person point-of-view: We only see what Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) see, leading to inherent limitations in our access to the environment. There are no dread-inducing overhead crane shots of the school, no fast-cutting montages of students being whipped and burned and buried. But these restrictions enhance our profound identification with the students in whose heads we reside, cementing the idea that the Nickel Academy (the fictional stand-in for Dozier) is an existential prison. There is no outside world, save for Elwood and Turner’s deployment to the houses of Nickel staff, where they’re exploited for slave labor. Even the movie’s frame itself is a box with four walls, with little hope for escape.
For Elwood, whom we follow from the beginning, it wasn’t always so. The opening third of Nickel Boys is dreamlike — very much akin to Terrence Malick memory films like The Tree of Life — as it captures Elwood’s childhood in a series of fragmented but indelible images: the boy’s full-body reflection as he watches eight televisions tuned to a Martin Luther King Jr. speech from a shop window in his hometown of Tallahassee; his face reflected in his grandmother’s iron as it glides across its board like a cruise liner on calm waters; a pamphlet for the Nickel Academy, handed to Elwood by an encouraging high school teacher unaware of the school’s abuses, slipping down a refrigerator wall by a weak magnet. Ross’ purely imagistic approach to delivering information suggests the ways in which memories are implanted and recalled; much like Elwood himself, we won’t soon forget them.
The same goes for his long-suffering time at Nickel, be it his impressionistic inventory of the torture room, or his capturing of an alligator in the walls of a classroom, a reminder of its site-specific remnants of wild Florida. In one of Ross’ more transcendent touches, he offers glimpses into the world events happening outside of Elwood’s reality, namely the Apollo 8 moonshot — presenting a poignant contrast between vastness and restriction, frontier and penitentiary.
While Nickel Boys naturally explores dark spaces, it is not a depressing film. It overflows with empathy, and it is cathartic in its survivalism. The scenes that burn themselves into Elwood’s head (and ours) are recorded in his diary of abuse, evidence for a reckoning to come. Unlike the more jaded Turner, he maintains his idealism, and a steadfast belief in King’s long arc toward justice. And so should we.
NICKEL BOYS. Director: RaMell Ross; Distributor: Amazon MGM, Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger; Opens: Friday