From “Boy A” (which launched Andrew Garfield’s career) to “Zero for Conduct,” movies set in failing boarding schools and juvenile correctional facilities are endless. In “Nickel Boys,” director Ramiel Ross finds new color in this tightly regulated genre, transforming a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a simple tone poem. The book by Colson Whitehead is great, but you’ve probably seen much of it on screen before, so Ross strips away as many words as possible, seeking instead images to tell the story of El Wood, a Tallahassee teen who is more than just a victim of the system.
But Ross doesn’t tell the story so much as inhabit it, to the point where I wondered if I could have followed the plot—which alternates between the 1960s and the early 2000s—if I hadn’t already read Whitehead’s novel. (I suspect this would be a challenge to others, who should take the unconventional form as an invitation to look beyond the plot for other ways to participate in the L. Wood experience.) For the first hour or so, Nickel Boys feels like the first narrative thriller since Beasts of the Southern Wild. Then Ross tries something bold that doesn’t quite work, and the experiment collapses in on itself.
Building on the promise of his 2018 Oscar-nominated essay documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Ross presents “Nickel Boys” as a series of personal impressions: evocative, sensory memories of El Wood’s childhood, education, and teenage activism, crushed but not killed by an unjust incarceration. The film puts us in El Wood’s shoes—his point of view is one Ross privileges—using a variation on the style Terrence Malick pioneered in “The Tree of Life” to enhance empathy.
When we look at the world through El Wood’s eyes, we see our surroundings, not the color of his skin. We feel the gaze of others, and are instructed when to avert our own gaze, at which point the camera pans down, as if to avoid being beaten for insubordination. El Wood is rarely seen, reflected in a bus window or captured by the flash of a photo booth.
Among those who recognize Wood’s existence, some see potential—like Wood’s teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmy Fales), who gives the boy a pamphlet about Melvin Griggs College, as well as a record of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches—while others are determined to limit his abilities. There is an unmistakable innocence in the early scenes, where Wood is, as the country itself puts it, an “equal creature,” but 1960s Florida society has taught him otherwise. Despite all this, the boy never forgets King’s words about turning “the capacity to suffer” into a weapon against oppression.
In one key early shot, Elwood sits at the kitchen table as his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis Taylor) prepares a meal. His gaze is directed to the refrigerator, where Mr. Hill’s pamphlet is slowly sliding toward the floor—a metaphor for what will happen to that opportunity in his life. Elwood is headed to Melvin Griggs when he gets into the wrong car. It’s a stolen Impala, and even though Elwood was in another car, the white authorities want to teach him a lesson, so Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy.
For a short time, El Wood believes he can continue his education there, but this institution is not a school; it is an illegally segregated penal system where boys spend long hours working, or doing “community service” (the administration’s name for selling supplies intended for students to local businesses). Nearly a century after the abolition of slavery, the community uses this loophole to exploit free black labor.
In writing Nickel Boys, Whitehead took inspiration from the Dozier School for Boys, whose egregious treatment of black students resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people (the unmarked graves were discovered years after Nickel Boys). Whitehead, who also wrote The Underground Railroad, describes the kind of unspeakable abuse that must have occurred at Dozier in his novel, and another filmmaker would surely have done the same in his adaptation. But not Ross. Many films have already gone down that road, from Alan Clarke’s Scumbag to Barry Levinson’s more sentimental Sleepers.
Such films were important in their time, but they all dealt with almost the same themes—merciless beatings, solitary confinement, homosexual harassment, and death (by suicide or murder) that eventually attracts outside scrutiny—that they have become clichés. Ross does not intend to repeat them here, but rather to leave such aspects out between the lines or outside the edges of the frame.
Once El Wood arrives at Nickel Academy, something supernatural happens. As a boy, he felt alone in the world, but in Nickel, he finally sees in another person a reflection of himself—an idea Ross interprets a bit literally, breaking through the rigid subjectivity of El Wood’s experience and leaping across the cafeteria table to Turner (Brandon Wilson), a lighter-skinned kid his age. Ross replays the scene from Turner’s perspective, and from that point on, we see El Wood (Ethan Herisse) through his new friend, as the film slips between their perspectives.
This formal shift solves one of the film’s limitations up to this point: we as viewers want to see the human face, and Ross has denied us that until now (which is why some audiences are frustrated by Dardenne films, where so much time is spent staring at the backs of people’s heads). Ross intends us to empathize with El Wood, but a century of cinema has trained us to do that by looking at people’s faces. in His eyes, instead of during Now, with Turner's addition, we can finally study El Wood's facial expressions—though I found them largely incomplete.
In fact, most people hide their feelings. While actors use tricks to invite us into their characters’ heads, Herris plays El Wood mostly in an ambiguous way, his stoic face belying the stubborn idealism of a young man—a fundamental dimension of his character in the book, and one that goes largely unspoken here. But Ross has another reason to radically rewrite the rules of cinema in this case, though revealing it here would spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say, the future is not what it seems, and Ross has reasons to hide the film’s biggest star, Daveed Diggs (who appears only from the back).
Like Moonlight before it, Whitehead’s novel is divided into three distinct periods. It’s conceivable that Ross would have found a way to make his adaptation equally powerful. Instead, The Nickel Boys unravels as multiple perspectives and timelines overlap, and gets lost in digressions—from archival footage of NASA missions to forensic digs at Nickel Academy. You can read the boys’ fate as a tragedy, even though the film is meant to be a travesty. The students seem to have learned something there after all.
