O Reformatório Nickel

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.

'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.

"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.

This is by no means a bad film, but it is a frustrating one. Sure, we all appreciate a movie that tries to do something different-but let's not confuse "different" with "successful."

The film is shot in a POV style where the camera is meant to represent the character's perspective, which ends up being wildly distracting. Not only does this approach pull you out of the action, but there are moments where you're left wondering what the hell you're even looking at. For example, there are several shots of the back of someone's head. Who is seeing that? Are we supposed to believe the character can see the back of their own skull?

I shouldn't have to ask questions like that. And I wouldn't, if the film had drawn me in. But the overly gimmicky style makes that impossible. This could have been a very powerful movie-the subject matter certainly deserves it. However, the overly clever filmmaking drains it of any real impact.

The acting and writing just barely manage to save it from being a complete disaster, but you still leave the theater wanting so much more.

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.