Nickel Boys, a film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead and directed by RaMell Ross, is one of those little-heard-about films that gets great critical accolades but little box office attention.
With just a limited run in theaters in early January, in addition to Globes, Critics’ Choice, Writers Guild and BAFTA award nominations, Nickel Boys has received nominations for two top-level Academy Awards: Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
About the Movie
The film was directed by RaMell Ross and written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes tells the story of two Black teenagers who become wards of a Florida juvenile reformatory. The story is based on the now-closed Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in north Florida.
The school gained a notorious reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff. The school, that operated from 1900 till it was closed in 2011, after which investigation identified 55 burials on the school grounds with nearly 100 documented deaths.
The central character in the story is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an early 1960s African American teenager in racially segregated Tallahassee, FL. Raised by his doughty, loving grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood is on track for academic excellence. Although still a high school student, he has been accepted on to a program of classes at a college in a neighbouring town.
When Elwood accepts a lift in a flashy car driven by a sharply dressed Black man, fate deals a devastating blow. The vehicle is stolen and Elwood soon learns that his plea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t going to cut any ice with the cops. He is shipped off to a state-run reform school, the Nickel Academy, where the brutality and cruelty experienced at the hands of the racist guards is mitigated, in part at least, by the close friendship he forms with another boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson).
Unique First Person Perspective
It’s a wrenching, enraging story. But what makes the film even more potent is director Ross’s decision to shoot a large majority of the film from the point of view of its two central characters, Elwood and Turner.
Instead of watching the characters interact, you see the story from the character’s perspective, just like he’s seeing it.
For example, in the early part of the film, a patchwork of memories from Elwood’s early years shows the camera tracking the infant Elwood’s gaze.. He’s enthralled by a gold bangle on his mother’s arm. Through background conversation, we gather that this is a goodbye party for Elwood’s parents, and it’s likely the last time he’ll see them.
This POV device is disorientating at first, but it soon becomes clear just how effective it is as you see the racists bullet-eyes stare of a White man who Elwood shortly locks eyes with, before we experiencing the view we see as he drop his gaze to his shoes to avoid a confrontation.
The POV shooting is further strengthened by great sound and a scrapbook collage of archival civil rights footage that lends additional context to the story and tightens the threads between timelines that extend almost to the present day.
More About Director RaMell Ross
It has been a rapid rise for 42-year-old Ross who is nominated for best picture for this, the first fiction film he’s ever directed.
He was previously nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for his first documentary film HaleCounty This Morning, This Evening. That film put Ross on the producers’ radar when they were looking for someone to adapt Nickle Boys.
“I feel impostor syndrome all the time,” Ross admits. “Because the only thing I know how to do is what I know how to do … but film is a visual language. So you give me a camera and the people and I can do the thing.”
The point-of-view idea first occurred to him as he was reading the book (which is not told in first person), he says, “just because I kind of see myself as Elwood, relatively, and I think in first person”.
How to achieve it technically was one of many things Ross had to figure out. He was usually directing the camera operator as much as the actors. They also built special rigs to attach cameras to the actors’ bodies.
“We realised quite early on that they actually had to act and give their best performance behind the camera, so that the person who was in front of the camera didn’t feel they were imagining being with the character.”
How to Watch Nickel Boys
NIckel Boys is out of theaters, but it can be watched through premium video-on-demand platforms like Prime Video and Apple Plus. The film is available for purchase in 4k Ultra HD for $19.99 for $19.99, that’s still less than two movie tickets. If you’re a subscriber to Prime Video or Apple TV, you can stream it directly.
It’s set to begin streaming on MGM+ Feb. 28.