Los chicos de la 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.

A harrowing tale of abuse and mistreatment of colored youths at a reform school. It is exclusively told from the subjective POV of the main character and a fellow intern he befriends at the school. While I appreciate the ambition behind this, it unfortunately and somewhat paradoxically distances me from the main character. Some early scenes felt a bit contrived and forced with this technique, the dialog never flowing in a natural way. Watched this at Stockholm Film Festival without subtitles was also a bit of a challenge since it was very difficult to make out the dialog in certain scenes. You could grasp the events, but details was lost on me. Despite these objections regarding the stylistic choice, the story was still somewhat gripping but overall, it could have been even more so using a more traditional narrative.

I respect this film much more than I enjoyed it. While the director really took a big swing here, this film is a tad overrated. I think that's for two reasons: the way in which this is shot, and the subject matter. While both certainly have merit, simply because a film is doing something innovative, doesn't necessarily mean the film itself is very good. While the film certainly is a real technical achievement, and the subject is touching, I wonder if shooting it in a traditional manner would've made this more palatable and improved the film overall.

If you go into this film without knowing what it's about, you'd never know it's based on a true story. There are scenes, particularly in the beginning, that don't really add up to much ultimately. For a film about such bleak subject matter, the film feels very dreamlike, fantastical, and over-stylized. Because of this, the film almost feels like a projection or rosy retrospection of the abusuve reform school, in lieu of a realistic portrayal of what that must have been like for the victims. Off of that point, it felt like the director was unsure what he wanted the film to be about: the horrors of the reform school or the power of friendship between the two central boys. Much of the abuse is implied or heard off-screen, so how trying and scary the environment must have been for the boys is never really fleshed out, it's mostly implicit. And while the friendship between the boys is shown, how they went from being bunkmates to being best friends isn't necessarily limned or shown for viewers. The story is quite jumpy, at times includes arbitrary scenes, and thus the plot can feel confusing.

How nice the film looked took away from how impactful it could've actually been. The cinematography is certainly beautiful to look at, but the use of the first-person shots were unnecessary and don't really add much to the story. There are many scenes of characters talking to one another and because the film is in first-person POV, you have the actors talking straight into the camera; it more often than not feels awkward, stilted, and contrived, almost reminiscent of a video game or hologram. It just felt bizarre much of the time.

This easily could've been told in a traditional, third-person way and the film would've been much better than it is. The first-person gimmick also sullies the experience of understanding just how bad things are for the characters because we literally only see two perspectives, not an objective view or the totality of the mistreatment. And the pacing much of the time is unfortunately mediocre. A good half hour could've been trimmed from this film.

The performances are good though, and really carry the film. Aujanue Ellis-Taylor gives a great performance, portraying a grandmother trying to come to grips with a deeply unsettling situation she finds her grandson in. The acting of the two leads is also quite good.

Overall, it's beautiful to look at with some strong acting, and I appreciate the big swing that was taken here by the director, but the story could've been told and edited better than it was.

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.

The story this movie tells is fantastic and heart wrenching. The acting is superb. At times the director makes brilliant choices. Ok done with the good stuff.

What a train wreck. Seriously. I think this director has a great future, but he threw everything into this film but the kitchen sink. I hated the hand held shaky cam stuff. Why did he do that? It tended to be more shaky early in the film so it kind of set me off early and the story and acting had to win me back. The way POV was utilized throughout was very distracting. We are seeing everything unfold through the character on the screens eyes. At times it is really confusing. The camera is the character. No normal film type interactions at all. Sure if works from time to time, but overall it is annoying. The set up to when Elwood gets in trouble is very long and not well constructed. I have not read the novel but I would guess it has a section about the (limited?) legal process that occurs. It would have been a nice touch. Loved some of the odd montages. Hated others. I still gave it a 7., for the gripping story this film tells, but man ,what a weird film.