BEST PICTURE OSCAR REVIEW
My Official Thoughts on ‘Nickel Boys’ — Refreshing Take on Jim Crow-Era Story
NOTE: SPOILERS FOR NICKEL BOYS.
I came into Nickel Boys essentially blind. It’s about two Black teenagers trying to survive in a violent reform school. It’s heart-wrenching. It’s hopeful. It’s complicated.
That’s all you need to know about Nickel Boys’ story. However, don’t take its straightforward nature to be a pass against watching it. Movies like this are less about the plot and more about the message, about the character experiences.
Being one of the quieter-feeling films of the Oscar race, Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning book. The film works with the book’s prestige by dipping its toe into arthouse, elevating its storytelling with archival footage and surreal experiences.
Nickel Boys already has a stack of accolades to its name, which includes a place in the list of the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of 2024.
Along with being up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, Nickel Boys is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Here are my thoughts.
‘Nickel Boys’ — Summary
Nickel Boys is shot entirely from a first-person perspective.
The film first focuses on the life of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a young Black boy living in Tallahassee. We see the innocence of his childhood, hinting at Jim Crow realities in the ways that only a child could perceive them. His classmate makes a lynching flip-book in class, for example.
Elwood grows up to become an excellent student active in the Civil Rights Movement, eventually receiving the recommendation from his teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) to go to a prestigious HBCU academy.
Hitchhiking on his way to the academy, Elwood gets picked up by a man who has stolen the vehicle he’s driving. When the driver’s caught, Elwood is treated as an accomplice and is soon sent to the reform school, Nickel Academy.
There he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), a student from Houston who has been at Nickel long enough to understand its abuses. Nickel Boys proceeds to switch between Elwood and Turner’s perspective.
As Elwood and Turner’s friendship grows, so does their hope for someday leaving Nickel Academy in any way possible and seeking justice for the abuses they experienced.
My Review
Nickel Boys does not tell me how I should feel, but it is very much a movie guided by feelings and emotions.
Nickel Boys achieves this, for example, by how it presents its abuses. Violence is not shown so much as it is implied. Even the boxing matches later in the film between students are obscured by where the camera focuses its attention.
Midnight paddling sessions, solitary confinement in the “sweat box” — all of these punishments feel all the more intimidating and gut-wrenching when Nickel Boys forces me to use my imagination.
I appreciated that Nickel Boys recognized that its audience is smart enough to know the kind of abusive world its characters live in. Little ominous hints throughout the film paint the world to be more dangerous than we, or even the characters, can truly understand.
See the car that drives by Elwood with a giant cross hanging out of the trunk, shooting spikes as it drags along the road to the sound of a sermon. What is this cross for? KKK intimidation? The film does not stop to tell you. It simply shows, putting the viewer in the character’s body through the first-person perspective without expressing what’s going on in the character’s mind.
Saying that, I do think that the otherwise strong and intriguing choice of filming in first-person gives Nickel Boys an obstacle between itself and the viewer. I will see how another character reacts to what the first-person character says — with very occasional back-and-forth camera switch moments — but not always how the first-person character reacts to something.
Film is a visual language, and facial expressions tell a lot about a character. When Turner tells Elwood that Nickel’s staff denied his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) permission to visit him, I kind of wished that I saw Elwood’s reaction to that news in the moment. I could of course imagine that his face expressed pain, but I’m not interested in my pain — I’m interested in Elwood’s.
For this reason, the first-person choice both connected me to while distancing me from the character. I always felt just a little bit out of reach from either Elwood or Turner — whoever the camera was presenting from — and it’s a film choice that I think requires multiple viewings to fully digest.
This choice slightly changes whenever the film switches to future Elwood (Daveed Diggs) working on bringing justice to the abuses and murders at Nickel Academy. Nickel Boys shows the back of Elwood’s head, not his first-person perspective. While it is an interesting change, it still leaves the viewer to imply what future Elwood is feeling.
I’ll give Nickel Boys credit, however. Every choice feels deliberate and unapologetic. It’s a confident movie telling you that this is important, but we’re not going to tell you why.
See the Space Age allusions of free-feeling exploration, contrasting with the trapped world of Nickel. See the importance of the camera eye and perspective in this entire movie.
Being versus seeing the character — each perspective offered a different experience for me.
This film is all about perspective. It speaks about racial struggles by forcing the audience to look at it as an identity exploration intertwined with societal disenfranchisement.
This is Nickel Boys.
Concluding Thoughts
While Nickel Boys is inspired by the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, the film also made me think about Native American boarding schools in which abuses of a similar (or worse) nature occurred. Like Nickel, the remains of murdered indigenous students continue to be discovered at these boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada. The fight to bring justice for these students is ongoing.
The Shyamalan-esque twist at the end of Nickel Boys enforces this parallel. With a brief moment of blue-sky hope as Turner and Elwood bike down a road, escaping Nickel Academy, they are hunted down and shot at. Elwood does not survive. Turner tells the devastating news to Elwood’s grandmother and proceeds to assume his identity. He moves to New York, builds a life, and eventually helps with the federal investigation against Nickel Academy. Justice, of a sort, can be served.
Movies like Nickel Boys that show the hardships of being African American in times of particularly excessive disenfranchisement — the South either pre-Civil War or during the Jim Crow era — risk feeling like Oscar bait, much like Holocaust/World War II movies. In doing so, “Black pain” movies showcase hardships and abuses against its characters in almost a spectacle-like fashion.
For example, Lupita Nyong’o being strapped to a pole and whipped for three minutes straight in 12 Years A Slave is more so an instance of showing her character as an object for shock-value racism rather than an insight into the Black experience.
While Nickel Boys is another example of an acclaimed movie reinforcing the message that being Black in America is unimaginably hard (“and look into the history of why that is, viewer”), it does avoid the Black-body-as-spectacle trap and earnestly puts the viewer in the literal shoes of its two protagonists.
Nickel Boys humanizes its characters. While it shows its characters being objectified, the film itself never actually objectifies its characters. It shows the characters as people experiencing objectification through strongly-implied abuse and enforced injustice.
The realities and messages that Nickel Boys brings are important. It’s wise for telling these messages through a more direct, empathetic, unique approach, especially compared to other films in its genre.
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