You Should Absolutely See 'Nickel Boys' Before It Leaves Theaters
Usually I can tell whether I'm going to enjoy a movie in the first ten minutes. 'Nickel Boys' took much longer than that but wrecked me in the end.
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When I saw the Amazon/MGM Studios logo come up during the opening credits of Nickel Boys, I worried that I’d made a mistake, taking the time and money to see a movie in theaters that I’ll inevitably be able to watch at home in a few weeks. But I was soon glad I made the trip, because Nickel Boys is special kind of masterpiece, the kind that I’m not sure even works at home. Go see it. That’s the short review.
Nickel Boys rewards patience, and I am not typically a patient man. It’s only in dark theater, with a lap full of smuggled snacks (Bugles) and my phone turned off, that I can even allow myself to focus on just one thing and give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt for longer than it’d normally take me to check out or change the channel. In the comfort of my own home, I doubt the first act of Nickel Boys could’ve survived my itchy Roku finger. In addition to requiring patience, it comes on like an art stunt, feeling like your typical overrated awards darling that’s more “admirable” than “good.” Even granting it the grace that I ultimately realized it deserved, that stunt’s utility doesn’t become obvious for at least an hour.
Directed by RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys is filmed entirely as a POV shot, like a first-person shooter game. We see the action through the main character’s eyes, seeing what he sees, constrained mostly by tight shots without establishers. We open with our protagonist as a boy, staring up at an orange tree while his Nana (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) shouts at him to quit his daydreaming and come inside for supper. The dreamy POV conceit feels at first like the cinematic equivalent of the “child speak” bad memoirs often resort to in overwrought attempts to convey the narrator’s innocence. “He opened a cellophane bindle filled with a magical white powder — ‘cocaine,’ he purred as emptied onto a sparkling mirror…” and so forth.
Gradually we come to understand that this boy’s name is Elwood, and he’s coming of age in Florida during the first stirrings of the civil rights movement. Through his eyes, we see Martin Luther King on TV. There’s a high school teacher who was a Freedom Rider. The teacher shows Elwood a scar over his eyebrow — “Got this from a white man who decided to go upside my head with a tire iron,” he says into the camera.
The colors are warm and the cinematography (by Jomo Fray) is beautiful, but the POV conceit mostly precludes probably the main thing I go to the movies for: to see actors interacting with each other. There’s a genuineness to actors reacting to one another that often transcends the artificiality of scripted action (they can know what they themselves are about to do, but not exactly what their scene partners are going to). Those little moments of actual spontaneity spilling out are usually my favorite parts. Hank Azaria’s reaction to Al Pacino’s absurd line reads in the “Great Ass!” scene in Heat, for example, are as memorable to me as Pacino chomping scenery:
That Azaria didn’t know what Pacino was doing and the film captured his natural reaction to it are part of what make it so good — a confluence of events that came together just so, the ultimate rebuke to auteur theory. It’s the same reason we watch porn. We know it’s mostly performative pleasure, but we watch it looking for those little moments of real pleasure and then hold onto them.
You don’t get much of that when the actors (who have to be operating at a maximum level of craft at all times) are performing straight at the camera. It’s conveying an emotional truth, but doing so in a way that I found sort of annoying. And being annoyed with a film’s construction keeps you from being fully immersed in the action. It reminded me of the first time I saw a version of this trick, in the opening moments of Saving Private Ryan. Okay, cool trick. Now stop.
Movie POV is always more constrained and disorienting than real-life POV anyway, destroying at least as much “realism” as it creates. Whose POV is this, a horse with blinders on? At least in Nickel Boys it isn’t shaky. Still, for about the first half of the movie, I felt less like I was watching a great movie than trying to spy on one through a crack in a door. Can you just show me what’s actually happening, please?
There’s always one movie every few years with some kind of all-encompassing gimmick like this, and I usually get tired of it before the movie is over. But great art also teaches you how to experience it, and slowly, gradually, I began to see a method to Nickel Boys’ madness. Elwood (later played by Ethan Harisse) gets a scholarship to a technical school, but accepts a ride there in the wrong guy’s car. In the blink of an eye he gets sent down to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in the Florida swamps.
Elwood makes a friend in the chow hall — Turner, played by Brandon Wilson. For reasons at first unclear, the movie’s perspective starts to bounce between Elwood’s and Turner’s. The two come to represent two poles in basic Black philosophy—Elwood the optimistic true believer in the promise of the Civil Rights movement, Turner the cynical realist who understands that survival requires never betting on the good nature of your oppressors or their capacity to change. They form a bond, trying to help each other navigate the corrupt and capricious institution, which isn’t always obvious in its methods of subjugation. Nickel Academy operates as much on backroom whispers as it does on whatever the violent overseer happens to be screaming at you.
Meanwhile, interstitial sequences introduce montages of historical footage and later scholarship about these reform schools, eventually revealing themselves to be a third perspective — of someone in some near future, trying to learn all they can about places like this. Who is this third perspective? What are they trying to learn, and why do they care? It was a compelling enough mystery that I finally got over my natural aversion to the POV format and allowed myself to roll along with the yarn that was unspooling.