Blood Brothers

Nickel Boys is set in a nightmare but plays like a dream

[A month till the Academy Awards! And since I’m an Oscar nerd you’ll be getting my reviews of all the Best Picture nominees, and some of the other major ones, before the March 2 show. Reviews of A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, and Conclave are already up.]

When I heard that Nickel Boys, the RaMell Ross film of Colson Whitehead’s novel, relies on point-of-view shooting, I thought it would be something like Robert Montgomery’s famous version of Lady in the Lake, in which Philip Marlowe is only seen in reflections and fists keep popping at or out from under the camera. (A better movie than it sounds, but it never quite loses the feeling of a clever trick.) Then I heard that both Elwood, the main character, and Turner, the friend he makes in a juvenile detention camp for black boys in 1960s Florida, get the POV treatment, and I wondered how that would work — reverse shot-reverse shots?

When I finally saw the thing, though, I understood pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to be tricky at all. We begin immersed in Elwood’s childhood — gazing up at an orange hanging from a tree, then at eye level across a kitchen table where what seem to be his father and mother and friends playing cards, his grandmother cleaning up after white folks, playing with him at work, waking suddenly and drawing in terror a knife at his approach for reasons we have to figure out (and begin to once we realize Elwood’s parents have gone). We see Elwood listening to his Nanna, focusing blearily on a yellow sponge cake with a lurid, purplish strawberry on it…

You can probably tell the POV thing is meant to emphasize Elwood’s interior life, expressed by Ross, cinematographer Jomo Fray, and editor Nicholas Monsour in dreamlike fragments. Ross also repeats some uncanny images — such as a gator that sometimes appears out of nowhere, crawling in a field, along a flooded gutter, or floating — and feeds in bits from old news broadcasts, commercials, training films, Hollywood and home movies. As we settle into the film, we may cease to think of these as Elwood’s immediate impressions, and start to think of them more as memories that we can imagine Elwood turning over in his mind, obsessed, maybe trying to piece them together to figure what has happened to him.

Ross, who comes from a fine art background, is doing here something like what I call museum-installation cinema — movies that resemble those non-narrative films you see in museums and galleries that request the kind of attention you’d normally give sculpture or painting — that is, contemplative, patient, not needing the usual movie And Then What Happened hustle. (Interestingly I recently saw one of these at Dia Chelsea by Steve McQueen, another art-school guy turned auteur; it’s called Sunshine State, and has some thematic similarities to Nickel Boys, but is nowhere near as rich.)

That doesn’t mean we don’t also get, along with the dreamy stuff, a very strong, if discursively told, story. We learn Elwood is recessive, intellectually curious and lonely — a fairly standard trope in black bildungsroman. But he’s also keen on the growing Civil Rights movement, as is his Nanna, though she seems not to share or understand his reasons, notwithstanding she’s suffered more than he has (yet) from racism. We get a callback to this later, from the old black “house father” in the camp where Elwood is incarcerated, who quotes Martin Luther King at him nonsensically while drunk. It suggests that Elwood’s desire for liberation doesn’t necessarily give him a sense of solidarity with anyone else.

Nanna and Elwood are so poor that, when he gets a rare chance to attend an out-of-town technical school, he has to hitchhike to get there, leading to the heartbreakingly absurd injustice that puts him in Nickel Academy. This is a reformatory that promises timely release to boys who “keep their nose clean” and do good work, but it’s actually a thoroughly corrupt hellhole. We learn this slowly, as Elwood does, with prompting by Turner, a young man who’s been in the place for years, knows its worst secrets, and has been made cynical by it but, somehow, not coarse.

Turner is the other POV character in the story. The shift is announced dramatically, with a complete repetition of his first conversation with Elwood, seen first through Elwood’s, then through his own eyes. The reason is not made clear (though I, at least, didn’t think much about it at the time, so strongly did the story hold me) but in retrospect, and given the movie’s other attributes, I think it has something to do with selfhood and how you attain it — how the swimming pieces of Elwood’s consciousness we’ve been shown start to come together when they’re reflected back to him by someone who understands.

Which is not to say they agree. Turner has developed something like a philosophy about Nickel: “I used to think out there is out there, and once you’re in here, you’re in here,” he tells Elwood. “But now that I been out and I been brought back, I know. In here and out there are the same, but in here no one has to act fake anymore.” Maybe it’s this reasoning that has kept Turner from losing his soul.

It’s not that Elwood disbelieves him; he just prefers to believe there’s something outside Nickel that can redeem them. Both boys have cause to feel misunderstood and even betrayed by the other about that. But they don’t, not really, because they believe in each other.

It's perhaps mildly spoiler-y to mention that Elwood is also seen in the 1980s, living in Harlem and trying to make it as a man and as a moving company start-up boss and having trouble because of what he’s been through; also the stakes have been raised because people have begun digging up the grounds at Nickel, including the part Turner called “Boot Hill.” (…it isn’t even past.) He mentions at one point that his ex-girlfriend has told him “I have to do a lot of work on myself.”

These scenes we see from behind Elwood’s now dreadlock-laden head — a POV with self-consciousness foregrounded, you might say. At the end, as the secrets come out, we finally get a look at older Elwood’s face as he poses for the camera with a girlfriend — a suggestion that the bits of the past we’ve been watching have been running through this Elwood’s mind, and that, by facing the past, Elwood has literally pulled himself together.

That’s what I see. But even if my synthesis is wrong, the parts are vivid and stick with me. All of the acting is wonderful, but I was especially hit by Hamish Linklater as the monstrous head of the Academy — just watching him take his rings and watch off before beating a boy is chilling — and Craig Tate as another Nickel Boy who runs into older Elwood (Daveed Diggs!) at a bar and is not doing well and buys Elwood a drink and runs his whole sad number on him, in one take; that’s a real punch in the gut even if you’ve never been on either side of such a conversation.

I will mention as an aside: it’s interesting to me that, in at least three of the Best Picture nominees, disappeared persons are a key plot point.