Nickel Boys
To Roger Ebert, movies were empathy machines. One of the ways filmmakers build empathy with their characters i through perspective, whether it’s theirs, or the audience’s. A character does not have to be likeable to bring out our empathy, we just have to be afforded their perspective on the events they are going through. Few films in recent memory have created a sense of perspective around its main characters quite as strong as RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead.
From the opening scenes, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray place us right into the first person point-of-view of Elwood, a young Black boy living in Florida with his grandmother, Hattie (played by the wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). We first find him on the ground in an orange tree field, and we then continue to follow him through the years as he goes through school, inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the encouragement of one teacher who wants him to go to a technical school. As he’s walking to that school, he is offered a ride from an older Black man, but when they’re pulled over, he finds himself sent to Nickel Academy, a reformatory school with a very clear racial bias at work. There, he meets Turner, and the two become friends, and survivors at the school.
When Elwood (played as a teenager by Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) meet, Ross alternates from both boy’s points-of-view. The majority of this film’s 140-minute running time is from either character’s perspective, and even if it throws you for a bit, it’s impossible not to be completely engrossed in the narrative. In telling this story this way, Ross and his co-writer, Joslyn Barnes, are throwing caution to the wind, in hopes that we will feel some of what it had to have been like to be a Black child coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s. Of course, it is going to be impossible for a 47-year-old white man to understand that as implicitly as a Black viewer would, but how he builds Elwood and Turner’s narratives, our empathy grows for these characters. We understand that Elwood was a victim of circumstance, and deep racism, to end up at Nickel, and Turner’s background points to someone who’s been left to fend for himself, who has found ways to make himself useful, and will try and look out for Elwood when he can. Seeing these events play out from each character’s perspective allows for an understanding of them that just watching these events unfold would not. I was reminded of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” and in “Nickel Boys,” Ross creates the same sense of watching a person’s memories unfold, that sense of life happening to you and remembering it at the same time.
How does one quantify describing a movie like this, or performances like the ones that Herisse and Wilson give? Because they are only onscreen relative to how we’re experiencing the other’s story in that moment, one of the tell-tale signs of performance- a person’s face- is largely missing. When we do see them on screen, though, it’s for a specific emotional purpose, and we are haunted. That leaves their voices to express emotions most of the time, and that is where “Nickel Boys” gets its power from; the use of sounds, whether it’s character’s voices, or the sound effects relative to their actions, or when something is happening to them, and all we hear is the sound. By using first person perspective as directly as he does to tell Elwood and Turner’s stories, Ross is challenging us to experience this story in a way that is counterintuitive to how we typically would, and it is profound.
As the film progresses, we see Elwood older, first as he is working as a mover, trying to earn a living, and later in life, following the story of Nickel Academy as its dark secrets are revealed. In thinking about this arc of the story, I’m reminded of the real-life abuses uncovered in recent years of religious-run schools in Canada, that resulted in graves of indigenous people being found after years of being lost to time. As that unfolds, however, there’s something the narrative is not telling us, and when it lands, it is a shot to our heart, just another way of Ross to take his unique vision for “Nickel Boys,” and give us a lesson in empathy, in friendship, and in living life even when it feels like life is only looking to punish you for who you are.
