
Many times there are films that stand out in some regard to others. RaMell Ros‘s The Nickel Boys, the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is one such film that can be classified as exquisite or breathtaking. This film boldly tells the story of two Black kids, Elwood and Turner, who are brought up in segregation era Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a foolish young sociologist, idealistic but misplaced in a weekend Anglican youth work camp, the corrupt Nickel Academy. Turner (Brandon Wilson) is the one encounter in the black days of this crud. Nickel Boys places its audience firmly within the identities of African American teenagers regarding race in America.
Elwood Curtis (who is portrayed in these earlier scenes by Ethan Cole Sharp) is raised by a devoted grandmother Hattie (a tender Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) who works as a chambermaid in a motel in Tallahassee, Florida, where they reside. We first see Elwood Curtis’s childhood in a series of quick scenes with a cut of various people places and shapes, including a vibrant Christmas tree, children swinging on the monkey bars, and vague parents who will shortly leave the main character. Understanding that times are dangerous, Elwood is nevertheless confident that the worst is behind the Black people due to the enthusiasm created by Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches and the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
It’s a belief that neither his grandma nor Mr. Hill his teacher portrayed by Jimmy Fails, who was a Freedom Rider does encourage. It is the former who tells Elwood that there is a college for high school students that he can attend because he is too devoted to the cause and would like to help in any way he can. One day Elwood is going to this college and gets a lift from a man who turned out to be a car thief without Elwood’s knowledge. When the police manage to arrest that man and Elwood, he is regarded as a partner in crime and sent to Nickel.
The strong faith that his grandmother built in him however does not help Elwood at Nickel, where it is peaceful on the surface, but dreadful and savage somewhere behind those thick walls. But even if that was the case, as if saviors from Turner appeared and patiently waited to change that, there were no more such thoughts. It’s through his inviting gaze that we see Elwood. Occasionally, the camera moves from one of them to the other, other times it shifts away from the two of them only briefly. The emotional average of the film is put together by the two young actors, Herisse and Wilson. Though they are hardly in the scenes together physically, one can sense the heartbeat of watching their counterparts in the other’s eyes, expressions, and positions.
The ambiguity in the story of the film guides the viewer in an unintentional manner and makes them have feelings for certain characters. It states that the characters are people and not because of the filmmaking techniques the audience has to sympathize with them.
The same sentiment applies to a more dynamic nonlinear narrative that takes a number of decades forward in time to depict an aged Elwood (Daveed Diggs), who we only catch a glimpse of from the back, and which eases us from the burden of a type of racism that seems to only have shifted slightly by the present time. the photographs of black and white images of imprisoned black kids, holiday black children images, and even the Apollo 8 view, reshape our relations with the dominantly white historical representation in which the film is engaged.
The writers of Ross, Barbara, and Jim Fray, bring out astounding creativity in the material which is a result of their enduring focus on the case of books, which is in this case hard to adapt for film. They take what seems an almost unwritable book and transform the languid lyricism of Whitehead into a film that floods the audience’s senses with visions that would if they were not so chilling just be exquisite. Numerous images combine beauty and sadness an adult Elwood meets Nick’s former prisoner at the bar; warm embraces from Hattie endless orange groves with even young black kids laboring. Every shot of the Nickel Boys contains the reenactment of not just the time the time’s coolness, the time’s heavy smell, the time’s coarse touch but the very skin of the disposable. That phenomenon of the conjunction of the brutalizing exterior within the self referential interior is what gives this use of the POV its vitality. It is not a trick. It is an experience that is complex, and subtle, evolves from and reconstructs decades of film language conventions.
The politics of the film undergo in a manner, more or less the same upheaval. Elwood is firm that any barrier can be surmounted by resolution, the type of resolution that is evident in some forms of nonviolent conflict. Turner on the other hand is the optimist.
According to him, it’s a fallacy that survival is more critical than basic survival. Turning once again to the history of cinema, their relationship can be compared to the relationship between Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, a movie Nickel Boys refers to several times. Of course, The Defiant Ones, as they say, is the fantasy of white Hollywood. It suggests that perhaps the problem of race can be solved by respect on both sides, with a little more sacrifice on the part of the black man. It’s the case with Nickel Boys, no such myths prevail. One tends to forget that liberation is not a cakewalk. And Nickel Boys is perfectly aware, that there are no two ways about it, that freedom has its costs.
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