Nickel Boys is an artistically daring masterpiece
Nickel Boys is an artistically daring masterpiece
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RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses a point-of-view camera to fully immerse audiences. Where does history live? In documents, artefacts, bones? Or in memory, that fragile, boundless state we try to express in fragments, in talk or on the page, but ultimately take to our graves? It’s the question that shapes RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, a more artistically daring literary adaptation than almost any other of its peers. His film is a feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.
What it isn’t is a mere translation to the screen of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys – it’s testament to why and how we tell stories about the past and its traumas. Whitehead’s book is a fictionalised account of a friendship forged by two Black students at Nickel Academy, a so-called “reform school”, a euphemistic turn of phrase used to describe a juvenile penal institution. It’s a storyteller’s effort to approximate memory in the face of the monstrous weight of fact: in 2012, a mass, unmarked grave was uncovered on the grounds of the Florida School of Boys, containing 55 identifiable burials, with evidence of a documented 100 deaths at the school.
Each is a story now lost to memory. Nickel Boys honours them through the twin figures of Elwood (Ethan Herisse, with Ethan Cole Sharp as his younger iteration) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who view their fates under very different lights. Elwood, who we’re introduced to first, grew up in a world tinted by optimism – amid talk of the march from Selma to Montgomery, with Martin Luther King Jr at its head; television footage of the Apollo space program; and the promise by a teacher that, at the HBCU Elwood is set to attend, there are textbooks without racial epithets to cross out. Turner, meanwhile, was moulded by a harsher reality, as hinted by a choppy montage of an open boxcar speeding across the landscape. We’re offered no evidence of home.
