Nickel Boys is unlike any other novel adaptation. Despite following the plot and spirit of the book it’s based on — Colson Whitehead’s beloved novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Nickel Boys — rather closely, director RaMell Ross‘ adaptation just does not feel like it was made from a book.
The biggest risk Nickel Boys takes is telling its story almost entirely through first-person point-of-view shots, placing you in the feet of its characters. But even beyond that, Nickel Boys bears none of the hallmarks common to other novel adaptations. Where novel adaptations often condense and race through plot points to cover everything in the source material, Nickel Boys takes its time, with stretches that have little progression of plot.
Where novel adaptations are often dialogue-heavy and struggle to convey characters’ inner lives without the descriptive tools available to writers, Nickel Boys tells its story clearly, using visuals as often as dialogue to convey information. Nickel Boys is RaMell Ross’s first narrative feature, and it is a monumental achievement. It uses the medium of film to its best and greatest capacity, while also advancing what is possible through the medium through inventive cinematography that has emotional resonance.
Nickel Boys is a story about Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in the Jim Crow South of the 1960s. Elwood Curtis, a young black civil rights activist, is sent to Nickel after being wrongfully convicted as an accomplice upon hitching a ride in a stolen car. Another black student, Turner, befriends Elwood and teaches him the unwritten rules about Nickel Academy. Turner favors avoiding punishment and keeping his head down, while Elwood favors taking action against the injustices of the school. Those injustices start as vague threats from teachers and whispers among the students, but come into focus over the course of the movie, becoming more sinister.
“Man, the law’s one thing. You can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convince enough white people. I saw those college kids in Tampa with their nice shirts and ties sitting at the Woolworth’s. I had to work, but they were out protesting. And it happened, they opened that counter. But I didn’t have the money to eat there either way. Gotta change the economics of all this, too.”
– Turner
Elwood and Turner’s dynamic is very rich; the idealist versus the pragmatist. Elwood’s history with activism leads him to want visible change at the school and in the world. Turner sees it as more complicated because he recognizes that invisible structures need to be changed too. A law is a start; changing attitudes and economic realities take time. These themes are smartly delivered through a few pieces of dialogue and woven throughout the fabric of the movie.
The first-person perspective shooting is truly radical in its delivery. It is built on a history of films with empathy for its characters – first and foremost the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who often shot scenes of dialogue from first-person perspectives. There’s a scene in Nickel Boys of shot/reverse shot dialogue in the academy’s medical ward that is shot in precisely Ozu’s style. But the first-person perspective in modern filmmaking has been relegated to killers in slasher films and curiosities like Hardcore Henry. What RaMell Ross has accomplished here is radically different.
Rather than using the perspective as a gimmick, Ross uses it to explore what it would mean to embody another person – to focus on the things they focus on; to look away when they look away. It’s unnatural in that it isn’t how nearly any film is shot, but all humans inhabit first-person perspectives of their own, and so processing the information in the way the film presents it is the most natural thing in the world. It feels almost like the difference between listening to an audiobook and reading a book aloud. Nickel Boys places its characters’ lines of vision in our lines of vision and their words in our mouths. By doing this, the film enables us to access the characters’ selves – what it would feel like to be them.
This empathy is further developed by additional stylistic choices beyond just the perspective. The film is filled with quiet poetic moments that don’t advance the story but deepen the feeling of embodiment. These moments have the same effect as some of Jonas Mekas’ finest work – to show us life as we are used to living it in the moment, rather than the stories and narrative we place on it after the fact. Ross also isn’t so concerned about following self-imposed rules around perspectives – there are times when the camera is zoomed in on a thing a character is focused on, or when a movie a character is watching takes up the full screen.
Additionally, the film is not fully tethered to the timeline. At times, for example, Ross will go back to show a relevant memory that informs what is happening in the present day, as if we’re following the character’s thought process. Every choice here is so clever because it is all designed to deepen our feeling of embodiment.
As such, this is a demanding film. Inhabiting a perspective other than our own, particularly when that perspective has experienced truly despicable abuse and hatred, is difficult work. But it is important work that allows us to have a fresh kind of empathy. Turner’s perspective is that changing a rule is a whole lot easier than changing attitudes. But perhaps RaMell Ross’s phenomenal film can do a bit of the latter.
