Two Masterpieces

Nickel Boys a film by RaMell Ross.  With Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Trey Perkins.  Streaming on various platforms.  *****

I felt about the movie Nickel Boys exactly the way I felt about the book; I wanted to see it but was half afraid to.  There are many ways a movie could have made this story lurid and unbearable.  But director RaMell Ross did no such thing.  He got the point across without rubbing our noses in it, or making a movie we couldn’t watch.  He took a heart-wrenching situation and made it into an unforgettable work of art.

I haven’t seen everything yet, but it gets my vote for movie of the year.  I loved Anora, and thought it was a great performance, but it isn’t in the same league as Nickel Boys.  It seems trivial in comparison.

I wouldn’t have known the word for the technique that Ross used in this movie, but in an interview he called the scenes “oners.”  We see the scene from the standpoint of one of the characters; the camera is a stand-in for him or her.  So the actors speak their lines while staring into the camera (Ross said that the other actor was often behind the camera speaking their lines).  The technique is mildly jarring and takes some getting used to.  But ultimately it is extremely effective.

There was one scene, early on, where we got the scene from both directions, first one point of view, then the other.  That was when the two central characters first meet, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and the young man who calls himself Turner (Brandon Wilson).  Elwood is a self-styled civil rights activist, who has spent his youth listening to and studying the words of Martin Luther King.  One of his teachers finds an educational opportunity for him, a college where he can take courses at the age of sixteen, and he’s hitchhiking to that school—in Florida in the sixties, so he only sticks out his thumb when a black driver approaches—when a man picks him up who, as it turns out, had stolen the car he’s driving.  When the police pick him up, they assume Elwood was part of the crime, despite the protestations of both men.  He’s sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy, where the races are strictly segregated, and students stay until they are judged to be reformed.  They might eventually age out.  But there’s no set term.

There’s no chance to “reform”; the classes are a joke, and the black guys, at least, pay no attention to them.  When a couple of them are bullying (and apparently sexually harassing) one of the younger boys, Elwood steps in to protect him, gets in a fight, and winds up getting brutally whipped by one of the white supervisors, a man named Spencer (Hamish Linklater).  Elwood takes weeks to recover.  Turner had befriended him that day in the dining hall, and they became fast friends.

Turner is in many ways Elwood’s opposite.  He’s cynical, he sees how the system works, and he does everything he can to stay off the radar and take it as easy as he can (swallowing soap powder, for instance, so he can have a stomach ailment and be sent to the infirmary to visit Elwood).  He tutors Elwood in the ways of the place, and Elwood exposes him to a higher vision.  The two boys are good for each other.

One thing the movie didn’t sufficiently explain is the corruption at the heart of Nickel.  Local business donate food for the boys to eat—ham and eggs, for instance—but the school sells the donations and gives the boys overcooked oatmeal instead.  The boys work for the school, picking oranges, for instance, from the orange grove, and a few of the smarter ones—like Elwood and Turner—become part of the corrupt system, delivering food to buyers.  One of the white kids drives a truck and accompanies them.

As in the novel, the movie flashes forward to a time when Elwood is living in New York and researching a scandal that is coming out about the school, not the corruption about food but the fact that boys died there, some beaten to death, some shot when they tried to escape (Elwood and Turner know at least one person who disappeared that way, a guy named Griff).  Elwood in the future seems to have made a decent life for himself; he has a girlfriend and runs his own moving company.  But he’s haunted by his past and can’t stop obsessing about it.

The remarkable thing about this movie is the way it tells the story so sparingly, doing the work of the entire book with a handful of scenes.  One such scene is when Elwood’s grandmother is finally able to visit him and tries to break the news that the lawyer who has seen this as a “clear miscarriage of justice” is no longer working on the case.  That scene, a long roundabout soliloquy by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, is masterful.  The other key scene, and one of the longest ones in the movie, is when Elwood is in a bar in New York and runs into one of his old friends from the place, a guy they called Chickie Pete (Trey Perkins).  Again, the acting in that scene is masterful, vastly understated, as the two men look back on what they went through.  Both of those scenes, low key as they are, are heartbreaking, and tell a huge part of the story.

Eventually the boys have to do something.  Elwood, characteristically, has kept a notebook detailing the incidents of corruption, and believes that if he can get it into the right hands—a member of the board of directors, for instance—the place will implode.  Turner’s alternative is to take off and run, but in a way the authorities wouldn’t suspect (head south, not north).  He is finally convinced by Elwood, though, and tries to deliver the notebook to someone with authority, but when that effort fails—as he suspected it would—and Elwood has been singled out for punishment, and almost certain death, they take off.

As in the book, there’s a stunning surprise at the end, and I’m not sure someone new to the story will get the full impact of that or even understand it.  The question I keep asking myself is, do you have to read the book to fully appreciate the movie.  I don’t think you do, but it doesn’t interfere with things to know the backstory: the movie doesn’t lose any of its power.  I can’t think of another great novel which was rendered in a movie equally great (possibly The Leopard, though the great version of that movie is hard to find).  But this film version is fully worthy of the novel and tells the story in an entirely unique way.  It’s completely different and also the same.