The 2012 discovery of an unmarked mass grave on the grounds of the Florida School for Boys was the kind of headline that short-circuits the brain. Archaeologists estimate that around a hundred young people died from the abuse and forget the century of use of the youth reformatory. How can you deal with such magnitude of buried pain?
Author Colson Whitehead channeled that pain into “The Nickel Boys,” a loosely fictionalized 2019 novel about two black friends at Nickel Academy, and found feelings so beautiful that it won a Pulitzer Prize. A direct adaptation would have power, but it is even greater. that the book fell into the hands of a true humanist like RaMell Ross. In his first feature film, the director not only turns nameless bones into other people, but also turns his other people into cameras: the audience sees the whole, literally, through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner ( Brandon Wilson). We may simply not be hooked on their point of view anymore.
Ross describes his visual taste as a tribute to the “banal epic. ” The little moments (a spaghetti dinner, a smiling girl, some Christmas tinsel) are filmed by cinematographer Jomo Fray with such grandeur that they become important. He already made a documentary using this technique, the Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” set in Alabama. The goal is not only to show that the world is surrounded by beauty; is that its characters are also active observers of it.
This shouldn’t seem like a radical act except that Ross uses the technique to immortalize the days of Black Americans in the South whose lives are more often looked at than through. Outsiders tend to cram people into a box, force them to fit a message that ranges from exploitative to tediously well-meaning. Ross sets them free. The message is simply that Elwood and Turner are human beings.
The script, co-written by Ross and producer Joslyn Barnes, abandons Whitehead’s initial prologue about the depressing cemetery to instead emphasize that it will be a bittersweet birthday party for life. Elwood, who grew up in race-ravaged Tallahassee in the 1960s, appeared first. Glimpses of his world, from a young boy (played by Ethan Cole Sharp) to a straight-A student, move without a sense of urgency, which is precisely what it deserves to be for a boy who has no explanation for suspecting that his freedom is about to be unleashed. He’s smart, maybe not as bright, touchy-feely, and idealistic as in Whitehead’s novel, but it turns out turning him into a man was on purpose (Ross even dropped the “The” from the title).
It’s possible to read Whitehead’s book and think, “How could these horrors happen to such a good kid?” Ross instead wants us to ask, “How could this happen to anyone?” including the school’s bullies and white boys who live in a segregated part of the campus and seem to be getting preferential treatment. To be accurate, the white students were victims, too. Later on, both groups of students joined forces on a blog that gathered stories of abuse, a website that’s referenced when the film leaps a few decades into the future. But “Nickel Boys” is also kind to those who can’t confront their memories, even in its camerawork which refuses to record the cruelty — it’s implied, never shown. Sometimes, to endure, you swallow all the bad things and hold them inside.
Things happen when Elwood, almost 17 years old, hitchhikes. He doesn’t know he’s getting into a stolen Plymouth and can’t perceive how this choice will derail his future, even if we warned him of what’s coming. But Ross knows this road will take Elwood straight to Nickel Academy, so he extends this moment into a harrowing gag in which the driver (the late Taraja Ramsess) figures out how to open the passenger door. It is not something you are aware of in the first wake. You’ll see it in this second. Like Elwood, we start out naïve and only recognize past danger.
The concept of Nickel Academy being a school, by any definition of the word, is a black joke. Young men are necessarily slaves to painting in the countryside or running illegal errands under the supervision of a painter named Harper (Fred Hechinger). It is heartbreaking that this tragedy is occurring at a time when Martin Luther King Jr. is leading a civil rights revolution not far away. Worse, the school remained open until 2011, when it closed due to “budget constraints. “
Elwood is written to be so vigilant that it’s hard to feel like you know the character: he’s almost too universal. His individuality is most productive when we see him as his classmate Turner, his chin tilted back and his eyes learning to be wary. Elwood believes in MLK’s optimism for America. “It’s against the law!” He protests to Turner, the clever and funny cynic, that he can’t believe things are going to get better. Elwood is confident he can triumph over obstacles; Turner is resigned to overlooking them. The two debaters still do not seem to agree. As we take turns internalizing them, you decide who to trust.
From time to time, Ross and his editor Nicholas Monsour watched old black-and-white television footage of NASA rockets trying to send data back to Earth. In reality, the trend makes no sense. Is this an observation about the country’s priorities? An example of hunting up instead of around? Is this simply an attractive way to take a break from all the terrible things happening under the trees? In the end, I decided to believe in those transitions as an echo of Alex Somers and Scott Alario’s fantastically raw score with its fuzzy notes that sound like they’re being swapped between satellites, deteriorating as they travel through time, never knowing if they were swapped. between satellites. Your calls will be heard.
Ross likes to feel, not say. There are photographs of scholars balancing on stilts, young men who look too small to be there, and playing with toy foot soldiers in a puddle of milk. After Elwood and Turner suffer permanent beatings, the camera leaves their bodies and hovers over their heads, especially when the one we live as adults, played by Daveed Diggs, attempts to become a user in his own right. Dissociation has never been so beautiful. At its most moving, the film becomes a mood piece. There’s a five-and-a-half-minute montage set to “Tezeta,” a jazz piece by Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke, that would be fascinating twice as long.
As clever as the film is with its visuals, it is equally adept with sound. In the first shot, Elwood is lying in the yard above, and when he turns his head you can hear blades of grass tickling the back of your neck. Later, a buzzing sound is heard: a bee? A fly? – which, as crimes multiply, becomes an incessant hum, a scourge on the brain.
The film’s only challenge is that Ross is still learning how to act with actors. It does well when its background characters pale in the dining room, but the POV technique is its protagonists, even for talents like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s Grandmother. When there is an argument, which, fortunately, is not the case, it comes in the form of a user reaching for the lens and waiting for their turn to speak. The really awkward moments unfold like an audition tape in which the off-camera casting assistant setting up the lines is behind in his signals.
The only great verbal exchange scene comes when Diggs is sitting in front of a bar with another former student of Nickel’s, played by Craig Tate in a phenomenal cameo where his nervous twitches show us the shattered boy inside the boy. Now old, the two survivors are isolated in their grief — alive and fortunate, of course — but still buried. They are so broken that they cannot, or do not want to, relate to what they have experienced. It’s too complicated to see past their own trauma, but Ross showed us how they saw themselves as teenagers, with the promise of an even greater future ahead of them. We remember it. We saw it too.
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