Review: Nickel Boys director’s approach is radical – and riveting | Canada Voices

• Nickel Boys
• Directed by RaMell Ross
• Written by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead
• Starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
• Classification PG; 140 mins
• Opens in select theatres Jan. 10

Critic’s Pick

It’s hard to describe Nickel Boys. It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film – in fiction. Ross has been lauded for his 2019 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening depicting a Black community in Alabama. (The documentary is available to watch for free on Kanopy; and you should – to give you some depth-of-field.)

His latest film is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys, which in turn was inspired by the horrors of Florida’s real-life state institution Arthur G Dozier School for Boys. The school closed in 2011, and was notorious for being a site of violence and brutality. According to news reports, close to 500 boys were housed there in the 1960s, segregated into two houses – one for white boys and the other for Black boys. The students, some as young as five, were sent to the reform school for trivial offences such as petty theft, skipping school or running away from home.

Survivors, many of them Black, have spoken about the floggings, forced labour and sexual abuse they endured. In 2012, forensic anthropologists started to excavate a section of the school grounds known as Boot Hill, a cemetery on the Black side of the campus, and found 55 unmarked graves – although the number of students thought to have died at the school exceeds 100.

The Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson). A bright young man, Elwood is inspired by the politics and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. He’s on his way to college, when an innocuous decision to accept a car ride changes his life and he ends up at Nickel Academy, a school where bucolic exteriors hide horrors within its shadows. There he meets Turner, by turns charming and smug, and cynical in his outlook. The two boys strike up a friendship, uneasy at first, but then buoyed by their personalities. Turner shows Elwood ways to survive their bleak surroundings, Elwood’s optimism offers them both hope for redemption.

From the opening shots of an expanse of the sky, to a sideways glance at an orchard, back to the open sky, Ross establishes the idea of point-of-view. We’re seeing the world through Elwood’s eyes. Then suddenly, the perspective shifts. We see aspects of the same story, but now through Turner’s gaze. At another point, we have moved forward to the adult lives of the Nickel Boys, where the perspective changes yet again, with profound implications. Throughout the film, there are casual glances and awkward hugs, there are tendrils of conversations – and later abuse – heard off-camera.

Although the book speaks of unimaginable tragedies that befall Elwood and Turner, and other Nickel Boys, Ross didn’t want to depict the brutalization of Black bodies. He chooses, instead, to intersperse the narrative with archival footage – snapshots of the realities of Jim Crow South, a reminder that the moon landing came on the heels of the civil rights movement and a montage set to Ethiopian jazz. Some viewers may be reminded of the impressionist oeuvre of visionary filmmaker Terrence Malick, whose work Ross admires.

Ross isn’t the first person to question the depiction of Black lives on film. But his approach is certainly radical, and riveting for the most part. At times, however, his point-of-view perspective can be disorienting. There are moments you slip out of the film’s immersive world only to find yourself reflecting on the technique.

What you come away with, at the end, however, are fleeting images. Of two boys smiling at each other, a hug from a grandmother to her grandson’s friend, a mad dash on bicycles. Those images stay even after they flicker off the screen, searing our collective (failures of) imagination.