O Reformatório Nickel

Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, a harrowing tale of abuse at a reform school during the Jim Crow era, deserved a cinematic adaptation that captured its potent grief and unflinching brutality. Unfortunately, RaMell Ross's film adaptation falls tragically short, not due to its faithful rendering of the narrative, but because of a deeply misguided and ultimately crippling approach to cinematography that renders the story practically incomprehensible.

The film follows Elwood Curtis, a bright and idealistic young black man wrongly sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a supposed institution of learning that is, in reality, a breeding ground for sadism and racial violence. We witness the horrors through Elwood's eyes, alongside his more cynical companion, Turner. However, witnessing these horrors is a frustratingly difficult task, thanks to Ross's baffling stylistic choices.

Instead of establishing a sense of place and allowing the audience to breathe in the suffocating atmosphere of Nickel, the film throws us into a relentless barrage of close-ups. Faces fill the frame, disembodied and divorced from their surroundings, leaving us with no context for their expressions or the environment that informs them. This constant proximity might have been effective in creating intimacy if it wasn't paired with a dizzying array of first-person perspectives.

We're thrust into the shoes of various characters, often with no clear indication of who we're supposed to be inhabiting. The camera becomes an erratic, disorienting stand-in for the eyes of the boys, sometimes even inexplicably positioned to stare at the back of Elwood's head. This technique, presumably intended to immerse us in the characters' subjective experiences, achieves the opposite effect. It detaches us, leaving us scrambling to understand basic spatial relationships and the narrative flow.

The result is a chaotic, disorienting mess. Scenes that should be emotionally impactful are reduced to a jumble of fragmented images. Key moments of violence are obscured by the shaky, often illegible camerawork. The film's attempts at conveying the psychological toll of trauma are lost in the visual clutter. It's as if the filmmakers were so determined to avoid a conventional approach that they forgot the fundamental purpose of cinematography: to tell a story visually.

While the performances from the young cast are commendable, particularly Ethan Herisse as Elwood, their efforts are ultimately undermined by the film's impenetrable style. "The Nickel Boys" had the potential to be a powerful and necessary piece of cinema, but it is ultimately undone by its own cinematic excesses. Instead of illuminating Whitehead's devastating story, the film buries it under a mountain of ill-conceived visual choices, leaving the audience lost in the dark, struggling to see the tragedy unfolding before them. It's a film that tragically fails to understand that sometimes, less truly is more.

"Nickel Boys" is a strikingly assured and ambitious debut fiction-feature from director RaMell Ross. It is composed almost entirely of POV shots. This has been tried a hand-full of times before in film history, perhaps most famously in the '40s noir, "The Lady of the Lake", but never as intricately and effectively as it is here.

"Nickel Boys" is bi-perspectival. We experience the gazes of two different characters, Elwood and Turner, teenagers incarcerated in a Jim Crowe-era juvenile detention center that amounts to a borderline death-camp for its Black prisoners. I was struck by the similarities and differences between "Nickel Boys" and "Hunger", another overpowering work on life-in-detention. The older film is about the body to a visceral degree that few other movies have attempted and the result is a work of relentless objectivity. "Nickel Boys", by contrast, is about the effects of trauma and imprisonment on the mind and memory- a relentlessly subjective piece.

The tone is thus very different from that of most bleak prison dramas, at times almost affirmational. We're experiencing, literally seeing, the way Elwood and Turner view their conditions in ways that make their situation tolerable- largely by focusing on their friendship- each other's faces- and those of their loved ones. This is not to say that the film is artificially pleasant. One of the best scenes consists of a single long take of a conversation in a bar years after the events depicted in most of the film have taken place. It's a remarkably well staged and performed scene featuring brief but memorable work by actor Sam Malone as Percy, one of the detention center's survivors, uttering the horrors he witnessed in a tone that suggests that even years later he can barely cope with what he saw. Experiences like those inflicted on the characters perhaps cause more damage after the fact than during the actual experience when survival instinct takes over.

The bi-perspectival construction of the film also demonstrates the ways that experiences and memories are never fully constructed or belonging to any one individual. Elwood and Turner, for all of their differences, come to seem almost like one character. We start to forget, or care, about whose perspective we are viewing. These men are forging this part of their lives together- they are co-authors of each other's experience. In this sense, "Nickel Boys" is about themes larger than imprisonment and injustice. It's about the ways that time and memory enact experience, both making it palatable but in the process leaving defining scars. The film's final montage features images of cellular reality- our being recreating itself through creation and destruction even within a single lifetime.

"Nickel Boys" is not a perfect movie. Ross's previous work had been as a documentarian and the script he co-wrote with Joslyn Barnes and Colson Whitehead is characterized by some clunky, overly on-the-nose dialog. However, this makes the powerful performance of said dialog by stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood's grandmother, all the more impressive.

Despite all the issues I ended up having with it, I do admired Nickel Boys for delivering a unique experience that doesn't feel like something I've seen in any other movie. It's a very stylistic movie that attempts to tell an important story in an interesting way but unfortunately the story telling method didn't work for me overall. I very much not a fan of POV shots in movies since I find them so distracting and unnatural so filming an entire movie in that way was something I found to be extremely frustrating. It just kept me at a distance from these characters since I'm not seeing how they react during pivotal scenes. Instead of trying to get immersed in the experience I found myself more focused on the camera work in all the wrong ways. It's a very harrowing tale and one that understands the things we don't see on screen are all the more impactful. With it being such a disturbing story a vision that I could've actually gotten on board with would've done so much to get me wrapped up in this experience. But as it is I just found it to be a bit of a miserable watch that dragged unbelievably for me. I do admire the risks that this movie takes and more than that I see what RaMell Ross was going for. It's beautifully acted and did make me feel some genuine emotions while watching it but the main thing I felt when all is said and done is frustration.

'Nickel Boys' tries new methods in the film. The camera stays at the eye-level of young Elwood, and this is effective because it embodies the happy and cozy childhood of small Elwood. This eye-level camera movement implies that he's taken care of, given attention, and loved. That's the only good part of RaMell Ross's 'NEW methods'.

I'm now going to list all those 'fresh' approaches of the director. However, I cannot find the 'purpose' of these approaches. Why does he choose these specific tools and forms to create what effect on the audience? None of them are answered. First, screen ratio. The director chooses a 1.33:1 ratio. It rather feels stuffed, blocking a wider view. My sight is blocked the whole time. Second, lots of montage, jagged editing, and lots of quick cuts. Again, I don't know why the director chooses this way, and I'm sure his intention has failed because It feels chopped and segmented, hindering the continuity and the flow of the movie and making the ending more confusing. In addition to these editing problems, story development is slow, making things worse.

I enjoyed the artistic stylings of the cinematography. They were as much a part of the story as the plot and characters.

This was hard to watch mostly becausse of the unfortunate truths it portrayed.

Injustice is never an easy thing to swallow. At least for me.

This movie is definitely worth watching if only to inform yourself about the darkness of our past.

But at a 2:20 runtime, it felt somewhat tedious.

I get that the long runtime was meant to correspond to the long suffering of african americans and the lengthy civil rights struggle, but ultimately, it's message suffered for it.

Its poignant story might've been better served as quick, aggressive and brutal. Rather than as the slow and painstaking story it told.