Abstraction Over Understanding

“Nickel Boys” film by RaMell Ross, 2024

This is a film whose ‘style’ – a jittery, out-of-focus, occluded home movie method – is designed to create a dark mood without making things clear.  I’ve read the book so I knew what was being suggested or barely mentioned.  The chief conceit was to begin the movie through the central characters eyes -  Elwood - as a first-person view. We never see him.  Finally when he gets to the “Nickel” reform school (in 1963?) we see Elwood as only his best friend sees him, and visa versa.  Staring at shoes, upside down shots, views from above, too much of his auntie, extreme close-ups, partial views, flashbacks, flash-forwards, back of head views, donkeys and alligators, a long running time – the film uses ‘art house’ methods that actually detract from the story to emphasize a disjointed feeling.  Perhaps that is the feeling of jail for the director, but it also 'jails' the viewer. 

Elwood and Turner

This claustrophobic film never quite loses that approach, as if it was done on an iPhone.  However, given the real, racist underpinnings of the story, it will still depress the hell out of you.  As I grow older, I’ve lost my patience for ‘arty’ explorations like this, though they might please some film critics.  At one point I could sit through 6 hour movies, abstract plots, symbolism, dreamscapes, obscurity, jerky film-work and the rest.  Now these artificial methods just seem pretentious and class-based, though certainly brain-teasing. 

This is another terrible tale about exploitation, murder, cruelty and Jim Crow in the 1960s Florida panhandle.  In the U.S. it could be an “Indian” boarding school in the past, or a privatized teenage ‘reform’ school right now.  The Dozier state reform school exploited its black, Latino and white boys, making them work long hours in farm fields for free, similar to Parchman Farm in Louisiana and many other places.  Like indentured servants, the boys are promised they can leave for good behavior, but in reality they only leave when they 'age out'… if they leave. Dates and ages are vague in this story, which actually undermines the plot.  This fact is never made clear, nor that every inevitable infraction drops them back down the ‘leaving’ scale, as also happened to indentured servants. 

The managers steal state food from the black side of the school for profitable sale to the locals.  Like all prisoners, some boys do free work in town for upstanding citizens.  Like Auschwitz, the town of Marianna next door knew what was going on.  Did they know about the small ‘white house’ where beatings were administered, hot boxes in the attic, rape, disappearances and over 100 graves in the woods and fields?  Not clear. 

Most of this is hinted at, like a dream.  Nothing in the film is about the effort to close the 111 year old school which happened in 2011, nor the men who returned to testify against it.  As I recall, there were no indictments either.  It’s a story of almost complete black victimization.  A constant is references to the 1968 manned flight of Apollo 8 to underline the fact that this is not happening in 1868, as it’s a relatively modern story.  But again, too much of that, too much of MLK, who inspired Elwood, too many unnecessary clips of the 1958 Curtis/Poitier prison movie “The Defiant Ones.”  The ‘funniest’ part is how the racists can’t classify the one Latino kid shown, and shift him back and forth between the segregated barracks.

Elwood forms a friendship with another Nickel boy, “Turner,” who really understands how things work – and it’s not related to lawyers, inspectors or the good graces of journalists, at least in 1968.  It’s about power. This political difference is implied, but it relates to a liberal versus a revolutionary response to institutional crime. The differences are not totally separate of course, but they reside in a basic understanding of armed force and mortality versus thinking that formal ‘democracy’ is all there is.    

Instead of being a major release, this film will sit in the art-house market when it shouldn’t.  We saw it in an ‘art-house’ theater so there’s the rub.  It cost $23.2M to make, and has pulled in $2.4M so far, and that tells you something about the popularity of art-house style. A review of the original book by Colson Whitehead, “Nickel Boys,” which is not written as jagged, experimental historical fiction, is below.

P.S. - RaMell Ross, an academic and documentarian, was interviewed on NPR on 2/13.  The discussion was mostly about how he shot the film, his aesthetic practice and himself.  It was a very abstract interview.  Nothing was said about present prison, youth corrections facilities or teenage reform schools, as if Dozier school methods have faded into history.

Prior reviews blogspot on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Colson Whitehead,” “Jim Crow,” “Nickel Boys.”

Kultur Kommissar / February 9, 2025 

Note:  This will be the last year of the blog.  I have fiction to get to.