“Nickel Boys” screens Feb. 27 at 6:45 p.m. at The Eclipse in downtown Breckenridge.
You’ll be about 45 minutes into “Nickel Boys,” director RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, when the film’s most apparent artistic choice goes from gimmick to grandiose.
The first-person cinematography – the forced perspective – is what most viewers will talk about. Literally putting us in the heads of its two young protagonists is bold, unrelenting, sometimes disorienting, and often beautiful. At times I wanted to step out from behind their eyes, to see their world like I’ve been trained to see it in movies, from a distance. But that’s why Ross never breaks this point of view, except for that one, critical moment 45 minutes in. He wants us to see and feel and even hear the world as these boys experience it, without the luxury of cinematic safety.
“Nickel Boys” opens with Elwood, a shy, scrawny Black boy growing up in Florida during the Civil Rights movement. He watches Martin Luther King Jr. hold sway on a storefront TV, and then mistakenly sees MLK selling used cars down the street. Raised by his nana, Elwood excels at school and a teacher takes notice, writing him a letter of recommendation to a Black university. It promises a new world for this bright, quiet young man.
But Elwood ((Ethan Herisse) can’t escape his skin. Neither can viewers. We grow up with Elwood, watching TV, riding the bus, even falling in love, until the fateful day we hitch a ride with a suspected crook.
This punches Elwood’s ticket to “The Nickel,” a southern reform school where “reform” is another word for institutionalized racism. There are white kids there too, but they don’t seem to work as hard. They pull pranks with no penalty. They have a football. The Black boys, instead, have ladders to pick oranges.
Elwood soon makes friends with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a teenager of about the same age in number, but seemingly decades older in experience. Turner runs a racket with one of the white staff members at The Nickel, where they smuggle canned food for cash. Turner trusts Elwood enough to invite him along. The two grow closer, even joining the same work crew at a rich white woman’s poolside home.
Their friendship helps them abide the atrocities crawling just beneath the manicured lawns at The Nickel. Boys – always Black boys – are beaten, abused, raped. When one tries to fight back, literally, by refusing to throw a boxing match, he disappears. His fate, and the fate of dozens more, is quietly uncovered through scenes set decades later.
We see these horrors like Elwood and Turner see them. But when you aren’t looking, stop to listen. “Nickel Boys” was nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, but not Sound Design. It should be. And it should win. Every chirping cricket and slamming door is lovingly captured. When Elwood lies in the grass, taking in a rare moment of serenity, I didn’t want to leave. I could have stayed there for the rest of the film, listening to the leaves.
“Nickel Boys” is primarily set in the ‘60s, but it aches with pains still felt in modern America. The forced perspective reinforces who these characters are – Elwood often looking out, down and away, Turner always looking up, ahead and out.
This is no sloppy, shaky-cam rip-off of “Blair Witch” or “Cloverfield.” Every detail is purposely shown, or not shown, like an alligator appearing from behind a rundown motel, or the porcelain echo of voices in a group shower.
It’s another trick Ross pulls off with his point of view. What Millennial or Gen Zer doesn’t experience the world through someone else’s eyes? Through an Instagram feed or Tik Tok video, or a YouTube channel bursting with first-person GoPro footage? But even your feed is a luxurious escape this film rarely offers.
Whitehead based his book on the daily depravities he saw at a real reform school. I’ve not read the book, but I imagine this film is as close as it gets to the everyday horror he felt. When the lights go out, and the yelling begins, all I want in the world is to be back in the cool, green grass.