Review: 'Nickel Boys' captures the horrors of a racist reform school in all its cruelty, in a movie that's strangely beautiful
It’s quite a feat that director RaMell Ross achieves in “Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about young Black men caught in a horrific spiral of oppression in a 1960s Florida reform school,
The feat is how Ross, in only his second movie (after his acclaimed documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening”), can aim his camera past the overt violence and cruelty of what’s really a segregated prison — and by capturing the viewpoints of the two young men at the movie’s heart, crystalizes both the horrors of the place and the hope they hold trying to survive it.
When the movie begins, Ross’ camera — masterfully operated by cinematographer Jomo Fray — shows us the world through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a smart young man who is encouraged by one of his teachers (played by Jimmie Fails) to think about college, something encouraged by his grandma, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who’s raising him in the absence of his parents.
On his first day in college in Tallahassee, Fla., he hitches a ride to school, and learns too late that the car he’s in was stolen by the driver. The police arrest him, and he’s sent to the reform school known as the Nickel Academy.
It’s at Nickel — as Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes recount in their quietly moving script — that Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), an inmate in a similar situation. It’s also at Nickel that Elwood is brutally disciplined in a building called the White House. There, a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater) flogs him so hard that he is sent to the school infirmary.
It’s around this point that the camera’s point of view shifts from Elwood to Turner, which allows us — for the first time in the movie — to get a good direct look at Elwood. Up to then, we’ve seen his face only in oblique reflections. As Turner gets his first look at Elwood, the audience can sense that Ross’ direction is teaching us how to see these characters, and how to watch the movie. The first-person camera is not just an artistic choice, but Ross’s way of making us feel the weight of the movie’s heartbreaking ending.
The first-person camera does make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the performances by Herisse and Wilson, and we must judge them from the glimpses they show us when the other’s viewpoint is in play. There’s no doubt, though, that Ellis-Taylor’s portrayal of Elwood’s grandmother, trying to maintain an attitude of hope in an increasingly hopeless situation, is devastating — and provides the emotional anchor for this painful, beautiful film.
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‘Nickel Boys’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking. Running time: 140 minutes.