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| Director RaMell Ross |
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| The director with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor |
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| Ross with Ethan Harisse and Brandon Wilson |
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| Author Colson Whitehead |
NICKEL BOYS B+ USA (140 mi) 2024 d: RaMell Ross
Even in death the boys were trouble. —Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, 2019, opening line from The Prologue, Read an extract from The Nickel Boys
You have to be psychically prepared to see this film, as it expresses the black experience in a completely different way than we’ve seen before, becoming more of an immersive experience, made by a filmmaker with an extensive background in still photography and museum projects, known for constructing a black archive, where his real strength lies in exploring the power of film as a medium and an art, intent on challenging and even changing our instilled perceptions. Set during the 1960’s when America was a rapidly advancing culture that could go to the moon, it was also an era of Kennedyesque hope and promise, where possibilities seemed endless for change looming on the horizon, yet even as Martin Luther King was expressing his dream of a better world, age-old habits ran deep, as under the surface a different culture was defiantly refusing to change, twisting the knife even further, where it wasn’t just the KKK that had a murderous agenda against black people. A sobering examination of how one young man struggles against a racist and unjust system to maintain his dignity and integrity, where the director is interested in the development of an American black consciousness in the 60’s that didn’t exist beforehand, evoking larger societal truths, however, this is a deeply individualized experience, filmed in an unorthodox style, where one might expect a range of opinions on its overall effectiveness, as this is a film everyone needs to filter through their own experiences. In the 60’s, one question that was repeatedly asked was whether you believed in Martin Luther King’s non-violent agenda that some believed was too passive, where change was slow in coming, or the more fiery Malcolm X approach of fighting fire with fire, where blacks had a right to self-defense and to defend themselves against police brutality. While that philosophical debate was more than just an academic discussion, it was also taking place on the streets of America, where battle lines were drawn rejecting the ways of the past, with demonstrations happening across the entire country demanding racial justice. Outside of the passage of Civil Rights legislation, one of the strongest indicators that this was having a positive effect was that lynchings, a heinous practice of white supremacy predominately in the South that reflected a murderous hatred towards blacks, was no longer deemed acceptable, even among whites, yet what this film reveals is that there were other less public ways behind the scenes to advance that same agenda. Changing the name to the Nickel Academy, described as a reform school, though in reality it’s a prison specializing in the exploitation of black slave labor, evoking images of slavery, like picking oranges under the oppressive Florida heat guarded by white overseers, this film exposes the gravity of untold atrocities taking place at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, The Infamous Dozier School, also known as the Florida School for Boys, a reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town of Marianna from 1900 until finally shutting down in 2011. And while there was a lot of Florida newspaper coverage, specifically Ben Montgomery from The Tampa Bay Times who covered the story for years, (They went to the Dozier School for Boys damaged. ...), there was not much national coverage, and no one has been criminally accused of killing anybody there. Designed to be a model for juvenile justice, Dozier, according to the testimony of hundreds of survivors in a state-ordered investigation, subjected its mostly black “students” to malnutrition, beatings, sexual abuse, rape, and torture for 111 years, but it also included the murder of students by staff, buried on the grounds in unmarked graves (publicly claiming they ran away) that were only discovered and exhumed decades later, as in 2013, anthropologists at the University of South Florida uncovered human remains in 55 graves, some of them with gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma. Five years later, 27 more graves were discovered. So essentially this is a ghost story.
This is a film to experience with an open mind, with no prior knowledge or assumptions, and not influenced by external opinions or expectations. Adapted by the director and Joslyn Barnes, with a musical score by Scott Alario and Alex Somers, the film is based on the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, one of only four authors to win two Pulitzer prizes, the others being Booth Tarkington in 1919 and 1922, William Faulkner in 1955 and 1963, John Updike in 1982 and 1991, and Colson Whitehead in 2017 and 2020, as he was also awarded the prize for The Underground Railroad, which was made into an extraordinary made-for-TV movie by Barry Jenkins, 2021 #2 Film of the Year The Undergound Railroad- made for TV. A story of young black men losing their freedom for no apparent reason, this is a haunting elegy to all the disappeared boys, which deftly underscores the more sinister side of the national landscape, reminiscent of the senseless tragedy of Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013). Yet what distinguishes this film is that it’s told from the subjective point of view of the children, where viewers get the unexpected, as it's not really like anything else out there, told in a very unique style, something the director describes as “sentience perspective,” where this is more of a formally inventive, abstract concept film, as far away from the mainstream as it could possibly be, which can be challenging for most viewers. What’s most shocking is the pervasive use of first-person POV shots, where the camera obliquely assumes the identity of a different character, literally inhabiting their lives, offering viewers a unique opportunity to explore history as it is happening, with the ensemble cast continually staring straight at the camera, just the opposite of what we’re used to, which forces viewers into a different mindset while creating an intentional emotional disconnect, allowing us to process it more objectively. This shooting and editing technique was also used briefly in the director’s earlier Oscar-nominated documentary film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), immersing viewers in a kaleidoscopic and humanistic view of a small black community in Alabama. While the subject matter is illuminating, mirroring the disappearance of thousands of indigenous children in schools in Canada (Canada's unmarked graves: How residential schools ...), or the 215 bodies discovered in a grassy field behind a jail in Mississippi (215 people have been buried behind a Mississippi jail ...), the director’s primary objective seems to be to have viewers bear witness, as the root cause of that killing machine is ominous, a very different understanding of American history that has really not been told, cleverly interjecting archival black-and-white photographs from the Florida Memory Program of young men who were tortured at the Dozier School, a reflection of the director’s passion for photography and collage-like filmmaking. Approaching the subject directly in a more realistic manner may not have been as impactive. In literature, readers can gain insight and perspective from the interior existential reality expressed by the characters themselves, which is often untranslatable in cinema, often resorting to voiceovers, as the medium instead excels in expressing the landscapes and circumstances surrounding the characters. As an examination of the trauma of history, however, this POV technique is a highly imaginative approach, where the credit, of course, lies with the Pulitzer Prize winning author, as his novel is an exercise in subjectivity, formed by the first-person accounts of the men who survived the Dozier School, where it’s difficult to approach such bleak atrocities, bordering on William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, which utilized extensive flashback sequences, or the supernatural element in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
In America, geography matters, as different parts of the country view history differently, urban/rural, black/white, where one immediate observation is how differently northerners viewed what was happening in the South during the 60’s, as lynching was not really a part of northern history, but in the South it was an everyday reality, becoming rampant post-Civil War after emancipation, a period when blacks were also targeted for arrest on frivolous charges so the penal system could use them for free labor, a practice that continued more than a century after slavery was abolished, so while the Civil Rights movement was happening with the promise of newfound freedoms, behind the scenes, under the radar, another horrifying reality exists. In the early 2000’s, decades after this film took place, a quarter of a million children were sent to adult prisons in the United States each year, with thousands sentenced to life without parole, where black youth are still five times more likely to be incarcerated than their white peers, and in several states that still means disenfranchisement for life. Today, two million adult blacks are living in prisons instead of their communities, while in the early 1970’s this number was 360,000. That is extremely compelling. Anxiously shot by Jomo Fray, who also captured the visually ravishing images of Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023), this was shot entirely on long-lenses, 50mm and 80mm, frequently resorting to shaky, handheld cameras, while also using cameras attached to bodies, with movements reflecting a roving eye, shooting on a compressed 4:3 aspect ratio, yet one thing that immediately stands out is the location of Tallahassee, Florida, as you don't think of these Jim Crow-era things happening in sunny Florida, where we might otherwise think of Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), or Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight, as it would be hard to think of any other film set in Florida that is anything like this, so that alone makes this essential viewing. Right from the outset, director RaMell Ross places viewers directly into the perspective of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Harisse) and his doting grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a working class family seen watching the Apollo 8 voyage to the moon on TV, listening to the recorded speeches of Martin Luther King, How Long? Not Long! YouTube (1:59), later seen reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, taking pride in his classroom excellence, where his black teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails, from The Last Black Man in San Francisco) is a role model active in civil rights protests who recognizes his potential, encouraging Elwood to enroll in college classes while he finishes high school, recommending Griggs Technical School, a nearby tuition-free HBCU black university south of Tallahassee. His grandmother is not so sure, fearing for his safety and the white backlash towards blacks active in the Civil Rights movement, but Elwood is persistent, eager to attend once he’s accepted, believing in the promise of the American Dream where all things seem possible. Hitchhiking to the school, he’s picked up by a man who’s stopped by the police in a stolen car, arresting Elwood as his accomplice by association, with the judge sentencing him as a minor to the Nickel Academy, where he quickly meets and becomes friends with Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), telling the story directly through the eyes of these young protagonists, where this is the first time we see Elwood’s face, embracing their humanity, while implementing a sustained formal experimentation that might recall László Nemes’ Son of Saul (Saul Fia) (2015) which uniquely challenges our perceptions, as it does not fetishize trauma but encapsulates what it means and how it feels, literally bathing viewers in the experience. While the outside grounds are meticulously kept, with trees and landscaped gardens, for all practical purposes looking “normal,” the hidden secrets inside present formidable challenges not easily overcome, as the dormitories are segregated, the overly punitive authorities corrupt, while boys are routinely loaned out for labor to those who do the academy favors, and there’s a notorious “White House” for special offenders, where an industrial fan drowns out the noises of night time beatings, with a locked sweat box under the roof where temperatures soar to unbearable heights, yet even worse, boys are “taken out back,” never to be seen again.
The movie is shot almost entirely from Elwood and Turner’s first-person perspective, stringing together a collection of their interwoven perspectives, alternating between the two boys as they endure the academy’s abusive conditions. And yet for all the horror, the violence is remarkably understated, where screams in adjoining rooms can be heard, but not seen, where the filmmaker is able to communicate the presence of evil without expressly showing it, where this restraint adds to the impact, underlining the banal detachment with which the violence was enacted, reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023). The film is captivated by television coverage of astronauts hurtling through space, losing all contact with them while they travel past the dark side of the moon, creating an ominous reference to unforeseen dangers happening out of sight. At one point in the film, a horse appears inside the halls of the school in a dreamlike flash, with alligators and lizards also popping up on screen from time to time, expressing a dreamscape and symbolic surrealism within an environment that often feels like a nightmare. Rather than show Elwood’s arrest, the director instead shows the opening sequence from Stanley Kramer’s THE DEFIANT ONES (1958), featuring two escaped prisoners, one white (Tony Curtis) and one black (Sidney Poitier), who are shackled together and must cooperate in order to survive. While Elwood is more wide-eyed and open, exuding an optimism reflective of the teachings of Martin Luther King, believing in a brighter future in the Kennedy era of promise, Turner is more worldly, living by his wits and instincts, learning the hard way that virtually no one really cares about what’s right or how things are supposed to be, boldly confessing at one point, “Out there and in here, it’s the same,” reminding his friend, “No one else is gonna get you out of here.” When Elwood tries to break up a fight in a bathroom, he is punished right alongside the offenders and taken to a “beating room” in the White House. We see white and black kids segregated in the camp, where the white kids get to enjoy things that the black kids don’t, like nicer living quarters, the ability to dress as they please, play football, or have positions of authority overseeing their black counterparts, with blacks treated far worse, viewed exactly the same as lifelong criminals, always dressed like convicts. The authorities of Nickel are corrupt, as food paid by the state of Florida meant to feed those black kids are sold to restaurants and stores in town for extra profit, or they wager big on a black boxer to throw a rigged fight against a white opponent, and when he doesn’t, for whatever reason, he quickly disappears. The film superbly demonstrates how racism in America has long operated as a codified and sanctioned activity intended to enrich one group at the expense of another. Racism and white supremacy are the ideologies underpinning the economic exploitation of black people, which is only exacerbated by the legal force of Jim Crow laws. These laws put power into the hands of ordinary white people, as a white person could have a black person arrested for incidental contact, like not giving way on the sidewalk. The system benefited ordinary white people, from the shopkeepers who resold the food supplies meant for the reform school boys to the housewife who had her gazebo painted at no cost. In this manner, ordinary white people were invested in sustaining a blatantly unequal system, perfectly exemplified by what took place at a school like Nickel, which was held up as a shining example of success in the eyes of the public, while underneath it was a microcosm of American racism in the 20th century. Drawing together the past and the present, using flash-forwards that make it difficult to follow at times, all that remains is the unending trauma, with no real hope of closure in the future.
