Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
In a strange sense, movies are experiencing a new wave of artistic ingenuity against the backdrop of the death of the movie theater chain. Amid a conglomeration of content, filmmakers are using original ways to tell familiar stories to the American audience for the first time in years.
One such story is that of “The Nickel Boys,” the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that is an examination of the barbarism of the Jim Crow South when it came to the segregated reform schools; these “schools” were nothing than places of using cheap labor at the sacrifice of the underprivileged in America.
The film, one of the ten nominees this year for Best Picture, sadly suffers from diverting too much from the traditional, stripping away the chance to create something significant honoring the work of America’s foremost authors. “The Nickel Boys” by new filmmaker RaMell Ross may sometimes be a picture of great moments, yet it is still an uneven adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s beloved novel.
Honestly, I was a tired wreck the night I saw this picture. A night of practice heading into CIF had shot my legs, so by the time I rented the movie, I was asleep by the end of the first hour. If the second half had not brought together this disjointed story, there might have been no stars to mention.
Off the bat, I can speak quite honestly the most outstanding performance came from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. She plays the grandmother and parental figure of the main character Elwood Curtis, a task she feels she is failing by being unable to prevent the woes of her grandson’s worsening predicament. Suppose a picture could truly express a thousand words. In that case, Ellis’s face reveals everything. Her best moment in the film comes as she tenderly has a final meeting over apple pie before her beloved grandson is sent away to a reform school that is nothing more than a labor camp.
The issue is that I can hardly speak for the other performances from lead actors because the film uses POV frames, and we can never sometimes see the faces of the lead actors. “Both Wilson and Herisse give subtle, affecting performances, but the first-person approach means they are often not on camera… which makes it difficult to connect with their work on an emotional level,” as Maureen Lee Lenker of Entertainment Weekly describes.
Some see this stylistic choice as a positive. “This approach brings the boys together structurally as nothing else could… it feels as If Elwood and Turner are saying and doing the same things in parallel universes,” according to Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian Magazine.
Sadly, the story of the Nickel Boys is far from any parallel universes. It is set in America’s darkest past and does not need an avant-garde approach on a film inspired by the real abuses that took place at reform schools like the Dozier School for Boys. Instead, a better stylistic choice would’ve been that of “The Underground Railroad,” which used surrealist imagery comparable to oil paintings with wide close-ups to create an unshakable bond with the audience.
Strangely, trying to stay true to Whitehead’s work makes the audience member feel detached from the story. One of the apparent allusions to the story of the Nickel Boys is the 1958 social drama “The Defiant Ones.” “The Defiant Ones, a major cinematic milestone in its depiction of the need for prison reform and rampant racism to the prison system,” according to Entertainment Weekly. Yet the issue is the story could have the power of Poitier and Curtis running together, a story of male bondage.
Instead, the story is told non-linearly like the novel, cutting back from an older reform survivor to the story of the boys in the Ghosts of the South. “Like last year’s Zone Of Interest, it all but reinvents the language for movies… primed to spark conversations about its content and its form,” David Canfield of Vanity Fair argued.
Something did indeed spark in me. There were tears in my eyes by the tragic end, lamenting the anger that America robs the chance of the next great generation of men to rise above by squashing in them in an unfair system they never asked to be in. I wonder; perhaps that is why I gave it three stars. Any movie that pries tears from a man who has inherited the Irish cold is a winner in my book.
But disappointment sets in when you see a story that has a chance to have the impact of “For Whom The Bell Tolls” instead relegated to the forgettable yet enjoyable feelings of “The Old Man At The Sea.” I recommend the film only because I will give Ross credit for something that few people in the land of Tinseltown are doing enough: being creative in a world that feels more stifling as the years go by.
