Nickel Boys Review: An Impactful and Profound Adaptation

 

The violence perpetrated against boys, especially black boys, in the so-called reform schools of the South under Jim Crow laws was truly horrific. So, in a way, it makes sense that director Ramell Ross would use a cinematic convention most commonly found in horror films as the visual dynamics of his first feature film, Nickel Boys. Whether you call it first-person or POV film, the idea of ​​seeing through the protagonist's eyes has become synonymous with found footage and is primarily the purpose of horror films. There have been some forays into the thriller genre, such as the Screenlife Searching series and the action of Hardcore Henry. But aside from the "trapped" scenes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, this seems to have been the angle no director wanted to see their drama from. 

It's perhaps fitting that the filmmaker, best known for his 2018 experimental documentary Hale County This Morning This Evening, chose this year to adapt Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys. How. Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning film deftly weaves together two stories: that of Elwood Curtis (Helis), a young black man attending college in Florida, and his own story as an older man who gets in the wrong car on the wrong day in 1962. Now based in New York since, he's still struggling with the trauma. But Ross and producer/co-writer Jocelyn Burns take a sober approach, literally looking at events through the eyes of Elwood and Turner (Wilson), the closest thing Elwood has to a friend at Nickel Academy. Nickel's cicada-infested orange groves, based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, seem a world away from the blood-stained stones of Alan Clarke's groundbreaking British juvenile delinquent film, Scum. But the same fears lurk just beneath the surface: abuse, bullying by adults and roommates, racism and the belief that no one would care if the boys disappeared. Whitehead's work could have easily been adapted for television in a more conventional way, as was the case with his earlier, equally acclaimed novel, The Underground Railroad. By immersing the audience fully in the life experiences of the timid, civil rights-conscious Elwood and the morally questionable Turner, Roth bridges the distance between them and the exploited young men who will forever live with the psychological burden of being "nickel boys." "This intimacy allows him to refrain from showing us the worst atrocities, but there's no denying that, as in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, those atrocities always linger in the corner of his eye, a source of constant fear and menace.

But sometimes this same effect can be odd. At times we find ourselves in cinematographer Jomo Frey's shoes rather than theirs. His work here is undeniably superb, but it often feels like the camera is moving, rather than the protagonist's point of view. It's a little too smooth, a little too clean. Oddly enough, one of the most effective scenes comes when the film switches from first to third person, with the grown-up Elwood (played by Diggs, the brains behind the star of "Blindspotting" and "Hamilton") watching his nickel-boy coworker Chickie. Pete (Tate) scores. Maybe it's because it offers a respite from vanity, or maybe it's because it reminds us that we can never truly see inside someone else's head, a notion that becomes all the more important as the interplay between past and future becomes more obscured. Roth's work reminds us that the camera doesn't have to be God's eye on the story. He has created brilliant films anchored by captivating performances, and he gives clearer insight into the film's emotional core through unexpected but largely welcome camera positioning. FlixHQ Movies Online Free is streaming this film in full length.