The mark of a truly special emerging artist is the natural intuition to take creative risks in service of a message. Such is the case with director RaMell Ross whose latest film, “Nickel Boys,” marked the beginning of the 62nd New York Film Festival (NYFF) as one of the most awe-inspiring and innovative films I have seen in a while.
The film adapts Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Nickel Boys” and follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they attend the Jim Crow-era reform school Nickel Academy. The central location is a fictionalized version of the infamous Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which was shut down in 2011. Much like the real school, it is a place built on social hierarchy, corporal punishment and financial corruption. The way the characters and settings are realized in this film do justice to both Whitehead’s book and the real-life story.
By asking audiences to use their imagination to fill in the gaps, Ross amplifies the horror of the characters’ life-or-death circumstances.
The film’s central aesthetic risk was shooting every scene from the point of view of the two main characters. It could have easily been an unnecessary and possibly distracting gimmick. Most audiences associate first-person camerawork with YouTube vlogs or found footage horror movies, not dramas. In Ross’s delicate hands, it feels like an essential addition to the language of cinema.
The film, similarly to the novel, draws its power from restraint — the book with its succinct prose and illusory structure, and the film with its subjective camerawork and lyrical editing. Many of the horrific abuses and human indignities are implied but never shown. As Ross explained in a Q&A session following the film, this refusal to exploit real trauma and get an easy rise out of the audience makes for a more memorable, haunting experience. By asking audiences to use their imagination to fill in the gaps, Ross amplifies the horror of the characters’ life-or-death circumstances.
Ross’ style is subjective and impressionistic and all the more realistic for it.
Proof of concept for Ross’ first person POV comes in early in the film with a beautiful montage of Elwood’s memories from early childhood: laying down in the backyard to soak up the setting sun, warmly embracing his grandmother who raised him, taking notes in school to prepare for a bright future that will soon be ruptured.
Once we get to Nickel, the film’s two main stars are almost never shown on screen together, many times exchanging Ross and Josyln Barnes’ naturalistic dialogue in long, unbroken, shallow-focus shots. After all, that is how we would see it if we walked a mile in the shoes of one of these boys. Similarly, a character portrayed by arguably the biggest name in the cast, who is connected to a central turning point in the story, is exclusively filmed from the back of the head until the very final shot.
The Hollywood “realist” style that clearly establishes geography and simply frames the most important objects and people within it is nowhere to be seen here. Ross’ style is subjective and impressionistic and all the more realistic for it.
The film hinges on these striking images with unique framing to depict even the most harrowing moments sensitively. In one scene, Elwood visits the “White House,” a building on campus where students face brutal beatings from the housemen. Ross decides to show us only the feet of the abuser from the same off-kilter angle young Elwood views them while laying on the cold linoleum floor. We as the audience feel so much for Elwood while seeing relatively little. Ross attributes this cinematographic style to a desire to accurately capture his own recollection of trauma. Perhaps like adult Elwood in the future sections of the story, try as he may to forget the harrowing events of his past, the little details still creep in.
Using another unique method of achieving realism through film artifice, Ross cuts together archival film footage with his original images. We see photographs of the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and pictures of the real-life Dozier schoolboys over a complex and hypnotic soundscape of field recordings and experimental original score that filled the Dolby Screening Room where I saw the film. Transferring over the techniques from his first feature, the documentary film “Hale County, This Evening, This Morning,” Ross startles the audience out of the comfort of the fictional construct and reminds them how relevant these subjects still are today. It is yet another example of Ross reflexively never taking the easy or most direct path to adaptation.
Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast,” which premiered at NYFF last year, proved that a film can transcend simple fidelity to source material and make its own artistic statement, but “Nickel Boys” is different. From the loose way Ross described his collaborative process in the Q&A, it was made with intuition, not intention. It deals with the dark, messy realities of racism inflicted on a young, vulnerable generation of black boys. Yet, it is rich with beautiful visual poetry and seamless in its execution of the book’s precise structure.
Although the film was produced by a major studio, Ross, in the conversation with Dolby, described his colleagues as a scrappy independent crew of passionate artist friends who spend the vast majority of their time doing other things for a living. All I’ll say is that Ross’ team should be making movies more often because “Nickel Boys” is one of the year’s best.