Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Bill Stokes
★★★★☆
Collective Memories : Film Review of Nickel Boys
By Geoff Carter
Memories come in flashes, snippets of sound, images, smells, sensations, or any combination of these. An assemblage of these recollections, like old snapshots, can recreate a life, a childhood, or a tragedy. Film is physically, in its most primal form, a collection of snapshots run before a projector light to give the illusion of movement—much in the same way paging through still photos can reconstruct a life.
The movie Nickel Boys begins with a series of seemingly unrelated images—a boy lying on a lawn looking up at tree branches, a close-up of a decorated Christmas tree, a classroom, and an older lady—a grandma. Iconic mages of Dr. King and demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties are also interspersed. Some of these images recur, other new ones crop up, slowly building into a vision—an impressionistic vision—of a young black man’s life during the Jim Crow era in the South.
This young man turns out to be Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herrisse), a scholarly youth whose high-school teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Falls) believes he is destined for great things. Ellwood lives with his grandma Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) in 1962 Tallahassee. Mr. Hill encourages Ellwood to take part in the Civil Rights movement, which he does, and then enrolls the young man into an accelerated learning program at an historically black college and university. While hitchhiking to the school, Elwood is picked up by an African American man in a car that turns out to be stolen. The man is stopped by the police and arrested. Assumed to be an accomplice, Elwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reformatory.
Elwood is bullied and abused but finally meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), a quiet but cynical fellow prisoner who expects nothing but abuse and discrimination as an African American. When he is abused by another student, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), the school administrator, brutally beats both the boys.
At times, the movie flashes forward to a mature Elwood living and managing his own moving business in a northern city. He is married and is living a stable life. As in the beginning montages, the viewer only gets glimpses of Elwood’s life and the camera, always positioned behind him, never reveals Elwood’s face. In the beginning, the camera is always positioned from Ellwood’s point-of-view. The audience never sees his face until he enters Nickel Academy and meets Turner.
Then, later in the film, the camera again is positioned behind Elwood, never revealing his face. It is only in Nickel after he meets Turner that we get to see him, as if he does not exist completely without the presence of his friend. Before this point, we only get to know Elwood as we see others react to him and define him. He is intelligent, hard-working, and is committed to the civil rights movement—an obviously decent and courageous young man. A traditional narrative film would put their protagonist in front of the camera, not have him be the camera, to coopt its point-of-view.
First-person film has been tried before, most notably in Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery and in some of the more recent hand-held found-footage films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. The latter are shot in the jerky—and, in my mind at least, distracting—styles to create a sense of authenticity, while Lady in the Lake, one of the first attempts at this technique, seemed contrived and forced. The technique coopted the narrative, the acting, and the entire viewing experience.
Screenwriters RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes seem to be after something else in Nickel Boys. Neither Elwood nor Turner seems identifiable to the audience without the presence of the other. Both have identities—we learn who they are from the contexts of their lives—but they are identifiable to the viewer until both are in Nickel Academy.
Although Turner and Elwood are friends, the contrast between their outlooks is stark. Even after his mistreatment and abuse, Elwood is still an idealist. Turner is the cynic who doesn’t anyone or anything. Yet together—the realist and the dreamer—are able to get the best of their oppressors.
Moving between the present-day Elwood and his days in the Nickel Academy, the film continues to build the history of what happened in the past. Grandma Hattie comes to visit Elwood but is denied. Later, she comes to tell her grandson that the lawyer she hired to represent him has taken off with the money.
Fed up with abuses, and against Turner’s advice, Elwood tries to deliver his diary of mistreatments and disappearances at Nickel to the authorities. He gives it to Turner to deliver as an expose, but nothing happens. Elwood is discovered and put in the sweatbox for punishment. After learning they plan to kill him, Turner helps him in an escape attempt.
In a flash-forward, after meeting Chickie Pete, an old Nickel acquaintance who tells him that a number of unmarked graves at the Academy, the modern-day Elwood is shaken and starts researching the scandal online. He considers whether to go on the record about the Nickel Academy himself.
Using extraordinarily inventive narrative devices, Nickel Boys examines issues of race, identity, and friendship, fitting together splinters of memory, experience, and history into a jigsaw puzzle revealing personal, political, and collective memory. The big picture lurking behind Elwood and Turner’s friendship is the backdrop of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and oppression. The fact that these two young men are only visible to the viewer when they are together—or combined—speaks to both the necessity of solidarity and commitment.
The emblematic image of this film is the scene when Elwood and Turner stare up at a mirrored ceiling, seeing the reflection of themselves together. They are visible to themselves and us, the viewers, as two African American men united in friendship and purpose. They are parts of a whole, members of a group working together to ensure survival.
Nickel Boys is not your usual cinematic experience. The fragmentation of images including personal experiences, social memory, and historical iconography force the viewer to construct her own construct of Elwood and Turner’s harrowing experiences as young African Americans in the land of Jim Crow.
This is a brilliant movie well worth seeing.
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