The 97th Oscars may be over (Congratulations to Anora for scoring the big statuette, well-deserved!), but the Enuffa.com quest to see all 610 Best Picture nominees keeps rollin' along (I'm currently at 328).....
Another nominee at the 97th ceremony was RaMell Moss's powerful narrative feature film debut Nickel Boys, based on the novel by Colson Whitehead (itself inspired by an appalling true story of racism, abuse and murder at a Florida reform school). Set mostly in 1960s Jim Crow-era Florida, the story follows a young black man named Elwood Curtis, raised by his grandmother, who shows interest and aptitude in both school and in the Civil Rights movement. Elwood is accepted into a free college program but makes the mistake of hitchhiking to the college, his driver stopped by the police for operating a stolen car. Elwood is sent to the segregated Nickel Academy and subjected to harsh, racist conditions. He meets another student named Turner and the boys form a strong bond together. Turner is cynical about ever experiencing a better life, while Elwood is ever-optimistic and envisions justice and equality for himself and his fellow African-American students.
Interspersed with these sequences are scenes of an adult Elwood in 1980s New York, as well as flash-forwards to the present-day, as Elwood researches scandalous revelations that the Nickel Academy had been disappearing African-American students and burying them in unmarked graves for years. We are then left to slowly piece together what happened to Elwood between his teen years and his adulthood.
See the film is shot in first-person, sprinkled with montages of archival footage of Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, the Apollo space missions, etc. It also makes use of a 1:33 aspect ratio to get across a real sense of claustrophobia and confusion. We see everything from Elwood's (and later Turner's) POV, so the oppressiveness of Nickel Academy and its shabby conditions is forced on us, with no reprieve. Nickel Boys is a very uncomfortable film to experience, by design; the intent is obviously to make us feel what these boys felt, without letting us off the hook by allowing us to return to our objective point of view.
I honestly had very mixed feelings about the format of this film. It was clearly a very bold choice to shoot the entire thing in first-person, and I get why Moss didn't want to deviate from that at all, but I feel like it would've made for a better overall film conveying a clearer picture of what happened if it had alternated between the subjective and omniscient POV.
For example there are sequences of student abuse at the hands of the sadistic superintendent Spencer (an easy-to-hate Hamish Linklater) where the horror of the thing isn't fully felt because we're just trying to figure out what exactly is happening. Another drawback is that we alternate between Elwood and Turner, and as a result there are times where it's hard to figure out whose POV we're in at a given moment. Elwood at one point gets knocked out when standing up for a bullied student, but it comes directly after a scene involving Turner and for several minutes I thought it was Turner who got punched.
The scenes concerning the adult Elwood, played by Daveed Diggs, are shot from behind his head with a harness mount, and thus we're deprived of experiencing Diggs' beautiful ability to tell a story with just his face. It's not until the end of the film that we're shown some home video clips of Elwood clowning around with his wife. Seems a tragic waste of a great performer to me.
Finally the dialogue is tough to make out a times, since the distance a given character is from our POV is directly proportionate to the volume his or her lines are in the mix. I missed some important information on more than one occasion either because of the audio mix or because the first-person format kept me too actively trying to piece together the scene.
All this must sound like I didn't like the film, which isn't the case at all. I greatly respected the audacity of turning the format on its ear and forcing us to feel rather than just watch. I just think a mixed-perspective would've better served the narrative. This is an important story that needs to be told, one of many that's been literally and figuratively whitewashed in American History classes for decades. I hope we get more unapologetic films like this one, I just would've executed it a bit differently to maximize its impact. It's a brave and fascinating experiment with mixed results, one that probably rewards on a second viewing.
I give Nickel Boys ***1/2 out of ****.
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