Nickel Boys ★★★

A significant number of books are written in first-person yet seldom few movies are shot with a first-person point-of-view. I’m always curious to see a first-person film and RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys offers that as well as an unusual 1.33:1 aspect ratio, known for its use in 35 mm silent films. These decisions behind the camera inform themes central to Nickel Boys, a film that provides a novel perspective into the experiences of young men at abusive reform schools. The Nickel Academy in Nickel Boys is based on the Dozier School for Boys that had a 111 year history involving innumerable beatings and the murder of at least a hundred of its students. In 1968, the governor of Florida said that “somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago” yet the school remained open until 2011. In recent years, the extent of the school’s cruelty has been uncovered through the identification of unmarked graves through a forensic anthropology survey of the school grounds.

Nickel Boys introduces us to Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a student in an all-Black high school in Jim Crow-era Tallahassee. His high school teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) believes in Elwood’s potential and provides Elwood with an opportunity to attend classes at a technical college. Elwood is raised by his grandmother to become a man with exemplary principles and character, and by all estimates Elwood is destined to a good future. This changes however one day when Elwood hitchhikes to get to the technical college. The police pull over the vehicle, evidently stolen by the driver, and Elwood is wrongfully arrested. He is brought to Nickel Academy by the police where the administrator of the school, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), explains to incoming students that the school will provide an opportunity for the boys to reform themselves. Spencer explains that there is a hierarchy to the school and those incoming start at the bottom. They must exhibit discipline and complete manual labor to move up the ranks.

Elwood starts off on a bad note when he attempts to protect a student who is being bullied. When the bully punches Elwood, the two are caught and separated. That night, Elwood is taken from his bed to “The White House”, a nondescript building where he is beaten for misbehaving. From this moment, Elwood realizes that pure character, good deeds, and the Civil Rights Movement that is occurring when Elwood is admitted to Nickel Academy hold little relevance to the horrors that occur within the reform school. Nonetheless, Elwood is reluctant to dismiss his beliefs. Elwood befriends Turner who has been at Nickel Academy longer than he has and Turner is less optimistic for the possibility of justice. He tells Elwood there are four ways to leave Nickel Academy – by serving a full sentence, a court intervention, death, or escape. When Elwood stops receiving information from the lawyer his grandmother hired, Elwood’s prospects for release become a lot dimmer. Still, Elwood tells Turner he believes there is a fifth way to be free of Nickel – Elwood writes in his journal about every happenstance he observes at Nickel in great detail and believes his journal can make it out of Nickel and prompt the school’s closure. Should Nickel learn of Elwood’s journal, however, death is an almost certain outcome. Elwood telling Turner of his journal places the two in immense risk. And for Turner, his lengthier stay at Nickel fills him with cynicism and skepticism that anything can be done for the boys at Nickel. The Nickel Boys author Colson Whitehead, the book from which this film is adapted, has likened Elwood and Turner’s views to “two different parts of [his] personality”: Elwood who is optimistic the world can become a better place and Turner who is pessimistic given the dark foundations – “genocide, murder, and slavery” – of our history. The characters in RaMell Ross’ film clearly exemplify these perspectives.

When watching Nickel Boys, I thought of Sugarcane, a documentary also released this year about abuse that had occurred in the Canadian Indian residential school system. In Sugarcane, co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat attempts to construct an understanding of his heritage from his father, who was born in a Canadian Indian residential school, and from students of these schools. At these schools, First Nations people were indoctrinated to Christian teachings intended to deny the First Nations people education of their history, language, and culture. While this is occurring, the First Nations students were abused, raped, and murdered. Like the Dozier School which Nickel Academy is based on, hundreds of unmarked graves have later been found at the sites of these schools.

Nickel Boys and Sugarcane are two ways of telling a painful story with notably different approaches to storytelling. While Sugarcane is more rooted in realism and uncovering family history by examining the past, Nickel Boys portrays the firsthand experience of attending an abusive reform school. The film is experimental in the way it is shot, and also in showing thoughts, memories, and even the future, which is atypical for first-person films usually told linearly. RaMell Ross uses a similar approach towards filmmaking in Nickel Boys as he did in his first film, a documentary called Hale County This Morning, This Evening. In Hale County, Ross moves back and forth between stories of Hale County, Alabama’s citizens. The documentary unfolds as if it were a scrapbook, but with the pictures jumbled and placed on different pages. Nickel Boys is similar in that its audience will have to infer Ross’ intentions from depictions of memories, Elwood’s face in reflections and from Turner’s first person point-of-view, and even from shots taken from The Defiant Ones shown in full screen during key moments in Nickel Boys. Given the strong dependency on visual language in Nickel Boys, the film will be most effective when seen at the cinema. With a robust sound system, the scene inside The White House will be at its most unsettling and the first-person point-of-view in Nickel Boys will feel more personal and encompassing in a dark theater.

As mentioned, there are a handful of scenes that are set in the future interspersed throughout the film. These scenes help to provide insight into what happens to the boys after Nickel Academy; however, with exception of the scene where Elwood crosses paths with a former student, these scenes are non-essential to the story being told at Nickel Academy. The ending of Nickel Boys isn’t dependent on the future-set scenes and comes abruptly in comparison to the gradual pace the film establishes up to this point.