This is going to be a two part review of RaMell Ross' film version of Colson Whitehead's NICKEL BOYS. I am doing this because to say what I want to say I may infer details that may reveal late in the game plot details. Part One will not be spoilery, Part Two might be, so when you get to Part Two you can surf away if you want.
I want to begin with a word of warning. Almost the entire film is told in POV style, meaning everything we see is from the point of view of the characters. I say this up front because some people, myself included, are not a fan of it. There are reasons that it isn't really used in films except as an experiment or as a sequence in a regular film. At the NYFF press conference Ross discussed this and was aware of the pitfalls. Because of this, and because POV does not translate well to small TVs, laptops and especially cellphones I want to say that if you are interested in seeing this film (and you really should its a good film), do so in a theater.
PART ONE
NICKEL BOYS is the story of two young men who meet in a the Nickel Academy, a reform school in Florida in the mid-1960's. It's an abusive hell hole where the boys are beaten for infractions and sometimes taken to Boot Hill, never to return. The story is nominally the story of Elwood a bright young man who makes the mistake of taking a ride with the wrong man and is charged with car theft. Once at Nickel he meets Turner who becomes his friend.
This is a beautifully crafted adult film. It looks great, it is deftly edited to include archival material, has all but one great performances (I'm looking at you Hamish). It is the very definition of an award contending film, from top to bottom. Expect lots of Oscar nominations
It is a deeply moving film that reduced one writer I saw in the men's room to a sobbing mess.
In many ways it is one of the best films of the last five years... and yet I only like the film and I'm pretty certain it will be forgotten as a footnote film in a few years time.
PART TWO
As I said above I don't like POV films. They always feel artificial. The camera never looks the way we actually look, it more intentionally picks and chooses what we are seeing. While at the press conference we were told that the actors were allowed to just act with camera rigs attached to them, moving and looking where they did, but there are still multiple times where you wonder, like in the drive into Nickel that Elwood didn't look one way (to his right in this case), until that moment arrives and you realize that he waited for a special shot (or so it seems).
Because several characters are used to show us POV there are several times when we not always clear until a certain point whose POV we are seeing. I know why, because of where the story goes, but it still is bothersome. Is this Elwood or Turner? It's not always clear.
One of the biggest problems with POV, and it is something that deeply affects NICKEL BOYS has it in copious amounts, is that we lose a huge amount of the performances because much for a good part of the film the perfomances of Brandon Wilson and Ethan Herisse is just vocal and we lose the physical performance. This is bad because in all performances are are not just vocal, but physical. We get clues to the inner lives of the people on screen from the the way the character moves, reacts, looks around a room, stands, sits and so on. Having a character all or only revealed through a POV camera gives us zero clues about the inner life of the character. Yes we SEE everything that they SEE but we don't get any idea what they are FEELING. Sure in this case we occasionally get to see Elwood from Turner's POV and vice versa, but ultimately we have no emotionally and viscerally understood sense of the characters. We simply have never seen enough of them to really know them. Actually it ends up with much of what we feel are not what the character showed us but we have brought to the table. For me Elwood and Turner are largely ciphers.
This might have worked in the context of the film except that something happens about half way in the film that kind of rattles the structure in that is the introduction of Daveed Diggs as the adult version of Elwood. While his arrival is not troubling unto itself the problem is that the film is revealed to be a memory play from HIS POV. At that point you suddenly realize that well over half the film are things we could never see, because he didn't see them. Sure we can see his character's memories, but we can't have seen or known about any thing anyone else did or felt or saw. By doing the film in POV director RaMell Ross essentially breaks the film because we are seeing things outside of the scope of who really is the central character. (This works better in novels where language often smooths over the rough spots)
Yes, the film is a brilliantly made and edited film. Yes, it's wonderful that RaMell Ross doesn't spoon feed us and uses montage and inserts in a way that would make Sergei Eisenstein proud, but outside of the intellectual notions of what POV can do to show us what a character sees, it incredibly limiting in making us feel, and leaves the structure fragile to the point that any misstep in revealing information, can cause the audience to break with the film and go - "How do we know this?". We can't.
A bigger problem with the dueling POVs is that we don't see the actors enough, to the point that something late in the game went over the heads of numerous people in the press screening. For several people it wasn't until someone in a group discussing the film that someone who had read the book mentioned how something was handled, and almost everyone chimed in, "I didn't catch that," despite the bit spelled out. If the usually eagle eyed critics didn't catch it then the public is probably gonna miss it too.
In the end, I really like it, but I know it's film is doomed to be forgotten and remembered as a film of the moment. I know it will click with many people, hence the man crying in the bathroom, but Ross's intellectual construction of the film and drive to make people see what the characters see, instead of feel what they feel, will keep the audience away.
In all honesty if Ross had filmed this head on, not POV I would have had no trouble saying it's one of the great American films, period full stop. However because the mode of telling shaves away layers and layers, I am forced to say its a solidly good one.
Recommended for what works, with the proviso that if you see it do so in a theater, because this will mean less on your cellphone.
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