Post by Dracula on Nov 3, 2024 16:38:45 GMT -5
Nickel Boys(10/26/2024)
My other big complaint with the movie is that I don’t think the two main teenage actors here, while good, are not the strongest they can be. This is also probably in part because they need to act through the first person technique in ways that occasionally feel odd, but regardless they don’t quite hold the movie entirely on their backs. But there’s a whole lot here to like, in no small part because Colson Whitehead gave them some really strong material to work with. Nickel Academy is a lightly fictionalized version of a real reform school called the Dozier School for Boys and is a particularly fascinating look at how the most marginalized members of society can be failed through institutional corruption and societal disinterest and also the extent to which black youth were and are often viewed as expendable in society. The “school” is a different milieu than we’ve normally gotten out of movies about the Civil Rights Era and it also differs from your average prison movie given the youth of the attendees and the lightness of the offenses they were accused of (in the book it’s explained that a lot of the kids here didn’t even do anything and are only there because it’s used as an orphanage). The film’s characters are not necessarily the deepest, in part because they’re very young and are maybe more defined by outlook than personality and Elwood himself comes kind of close to being a “model minority” figure of sorts in both the book and the film, but this is forgivable enough given how much this is meant to be about giving its audience a glance at an experience more so than telling a story. It’s a movie that sort of needs to be taken on its own terms, and there are people who are not going to have patience for that and there are other people for whom this will hit them like a freight train. I suspect there will be fairly divergent opinions about it ranging from those who like it to those who love it, but I don’t expect there to be many who really dislike it.
**** out of Five
I used to read a decent amount of fiction, but increasingly that just isn’t the case. Between my increasing devotion to cinema as a hobby and the invention of the smartphone giving me something else to do during lunch breaks I’ve just kind of fallen out of the habit of reading novels and have become increasingly disconnected from the whole literary world as a result. I’m not proud of this, but it is what it is. That having been said, even I know who Colson Whitehead is. Whitehead is about the closest thing we have at the moment to one of those “Great American NovelistTM” we’ve long been searching for and his focus on African American history as his subject matter made him particularly relevant to what the intellectual class was interested in reading about in the 2010s and early 2020s. His big breakthrough was the 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad,” which was made into a limited series by Barry Jenkins a few years ago, which I had mixed feelings about. However, I was more interested to see what Hollywood would do with the adaptation of his follow-up work (and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner) “The Nickel Boys,” so much so that I actually went and read the book in anticipation which is something I only do on very rare occasions. I’m not exactly sure what it is about this particular project got me so excited, but something about the subject matter just seemed to suggest it would be something powerful, and now that it’s here it certainly brings with it a lot of food for thought.
The film is primarily set in Northern Florida during the late 1960s and focuses in on an African American teenager named Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) who is a model student, so much so that he’s on track to start taking college level courses at a young age, but this is cut short when he finds he’s hitched a ride with someone who’s turned out to have stolen the car they were driving and Elwood is charged as an accomplice and sent to a reform school. That school is an infamous boarding school / juvenile detention facility called Nickel Academy, a facility that is infamous for abuse and grift. While there he comes to find that this so-called school is doing next to nothing to educate or reform the “students” living there and that the people running the institution are instead strip mining it to make as much money as they can from it while using violence, intimidation, and possibly even murder to keep its “students” in line. While there he gets through the day by forming a friendship with another “student” named Turner (Brandon Wilson) who is generally less idealistic than Elwood but does enjoy his company and much of the film concerns their difference in outlooks and how that informs their experience during their ordeal at Nickel.
Nickel Boys was directed by a guy named RaMell Ross, who is probably best known for directing the Academy Award nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a rather loosely structured and impressionistic piece of work that kind of drifted around a handful of lives for a short period. Honestly it didn’t really do much for me, but it was something I’d considered giving another look some time. He makes his scripted feature debut here and has remained pretty adventurous in his visual decisions. The majority of Nickel Boys employs a “gimmick” of sorts in which actions take place entirely in POV shots from the perspective of Elwood and later Turner outside of a sort of flash forward framing story we cut to occasionally, which instead sits its camera behind characters’ heads. Beyond that the film mostly only breaks the POV to cutaway to what appears to be documentary evidence discovered after the fact attesting to the Nickel Academy’s villainy. The “point of view” format is definitely going to be divisive as this movie rolls out with a lot of people likely to see it as something of a distraction and I’m of two minds about it myself. On one hand I think I get the idea behind it; it’s trying to emphasize the idea of these characters as witnesses to these human rights abuses and perhaps get you more deeply into their perspective, on the other hand that seems like a bit of an extreme way to try to do that and in a lot of ways I think being able to simply see characters’ faces maybe would have gone a bit further in generating the empathy the movie was looking for. On the other hand, the film does often simply look interesting and I quite like what it was doing in cutting other material in with the film and does some interesting things with montage towards the end. There’s a definite visual continuity between this and Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which is interesting.
**** out of Five
