Perspective Change: NICKEL BOYS

In just two features, director RaMell Ross has proven himself a distinctive filmmaker with a purposeful, personal style. He has a roaming, poetic eye that alights on small details and from them grows a larger whole. It plays like Frederick Wiseman’s intensity of place through durational observation meeting Terrence Malick’s spirituality of focus. His first feature, documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a vividly intuitive montage of observation from its subject setting. It’s a portrait of the contemporary South through the lived experience of life in a small, majority-Black, town. The picture is attuned to its own rhythms of insight and awareness, rooted in what Ross would tell Filmmaker magazine was his intention to use his camera to “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” His new film, a fictional feature called Nickel Boys, is a further extrapolation of that concept, taking the camera into an ever more personal perspective, erasing the distance between character and audience and ultimately using the very form of its making to embody its themes. It starts out seeming like a limiting trick, but builds its own persuasive vocabulary to the point where the act of joining two shots with a cut—the basic foundation of cinema itself—becomes revelatory anew.

Ross’ Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, but it’s more of a transformation of that source material. He finds a way to give a movie a similar closeness of identification and fullness of interiority more associated with prose, and that more quotidian adaptations feel incapable of making cinematic. It tells the story of a young Black boy (Ethan Cole Sharp) growing up in Jim Crow Florida. We see through his eyes. Ross shoots the film in first-person, a trick rarely attempted, and almost never so successfully. The quiet boy’s occasional voice comes from behind us. Jomo Fray’s cinematography has the frame see only what the boy sees—bending and nodding; drifting away with his attention; looking at his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a television, the sky, a mirror, a teacher (Jimmie Fails). At first it seems to deny the film the power of looking at a performance, especially as the boy becomes a young man (Ethan Herisse) and we come to privilege the ways in which we can understand him by seeing him reflected back at us through the ways others treat him. But Ross’ daring gambit starts to pay off as the movie confidently—moving style as substance—finds form meeting function. It denies the basic shot/reverse shot construction and pins us in this one perspective to better rebuild our sense of cinematic grammar with its artful intent.

The story shifts into a harder, more harrowing mode as the young man gets in unlucky accidental trouble with the law and is detained in Nickel Academy, a strict reform school. From here the boy encounters inequalities and injustices as it’s clear the school’s idea of juvenile rehabilitation for its segregated Black students means a curriculum of labor and abuses and no chance for freedom before the age of 18. By placing an audience within the perspective of a person in this circumstance, it gathers an exceedingly powerful point of view, living and breathing through this traumatic experience, and yearning after every glimmer of grace and hope within it. Ross’ screenplay, with co-writer Joslyn Barnes, builds out evocative details with dialogue perched on the edge of poetry, while production design docudrama convincing provides an immediacy of dramatic intention in each new moment of struggle and connection. Frames flow intuitively. And this is also where Ross expertly modulates the parameters of the filmmaking to draw us closer into a vivid explication of its central animating themes and characterization. I feel it’s almost a spoiler to explore how the visual conceit of the film shifts from this point; it’s such a bold surprise that builds to a few key emotional knockouts. At Nickel Academy our main character gets close to another thoughtful young man who becomes a close friend (Brandon Wilson). Suddenly, we see from his friend's perspective, too, and it returns to us the basic shot/reverse shot construction in their conversations. It’s like a breath of fresh air—an overwhelming moment rooted in recognition of the power of friendship, of being seen.

It's all about perspective. We see our lead through his friend’s eyes. We now have two main characters, and their relationship to each other, and to their situation, grows and complicates as the movie arrives at an ending that’s as perfectly poetic as it is bluntly true about the long lingering after-effects of living through such violent prejudice. A third visual strand of the movie has emerged slowly in flash-forwards to an adult (Daveed Diggs) researching Nickel Academy in something closer to our present day. He’s shot from a first-person angle just behind him, putting us in a place not unlike that of floating behind the avatar in a video game. At first these glimpses threaded throughout feel like mere differentiation, but the movie saves a late moment of stylistic adjustment for a thunderclap recognition of the motivation behind that choice. It’s another one deeply rooted in the context of character, in the disembodiment of trauma, and in the hope that one day this man will be able to fully see himself and his context. Ross’ remarkable control over his style and storytelling is evident in these deliberate choices. What could be alienating or limiting is instead only richer as the film grows absorbing as narrative and character study without sacrificing the artful ideas behind its enveloping form. How rare to see a movie so unified on every level, and so satisfyingly complete in its intentions and execution.