Countdown to the Oscars: Nickel Boys Review!
We’re just days away from the 97th Academy Awards, and so much is going on: Gene Hackman’s torpedoing Michelle Trachtenberg’s In Memoriam chances. Timothée Chalamet keeps insisting he wrote all the songs for A Complete Unknown. Bruce Willis released his review of The Substance: “I’m speechless.” I thought this would be a good time to do a rundown of all the films nominated for Best Picture, counting down to Hollywood’s Hottest Night! (Besides the fires.) Some of these I’ve already reviewed, but to quote Harvey “Diddy” Weinstein: “Fuck you, you know you want it.” And so without further ado:
NICKEL BOYS: (dir. RaMell Ross)
Best Picture chances: A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.
I have to tread carefully on this one. In case any of you hadn’t noticed, I am very, very white. I follow sunscreen directions to the letter. I ask how spicy any given dish is. I go out of my way to pronounce it “NI-CK-EL Boys” just in case. Any criticism I have of the film is fraught with centuries of inequities. So here we go!
RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name. Whitehead is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a reliable addition to any white household looking to diversify their bookshelf. Nickel Boys follows Elwood and Turner, two Black boys in early-60s Florida who have been sentenced to Nickel Academy, a notorious reform school.
The plot cops generously from every prison story ever. It’s not hard to read the first two-thirds of the film as an almost beat-by-beat remake of The Shawshank Redemption. “Only four ways out of Nickel” Turner tells Elwood, before listing at least six ways out of Nickel. Elwood, who has been schooled in the ways of MLK, sees things different. He’s got a lawyer on the outside. Surely if things are explained correctly his unjust imprisonment will end and all records will be expunged. Fuck, I’m blacker than Elwood.
Leading the school is Mr. Spencer, played by Hamish Linklater. Linklater’s an under-appreciated gem of an actor, and I’m always happy to see him whenever he turns up on screen. Here he seems to be letting loose a little too much. Either he’s a really great actor or we need to keep an eye on him.
Much has been made of the film’s main stylistic technique, which is, aside from some semi-abstract interstitial visuals, having the audience be entirely locked in the alternating first-person point-of-view of Elwood and Turner. First-person point-of-view is nothing new, but as I watching Nickel Boys I kept thinking of how its primary use has been in horror films. Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs spring readily to mind. And so it’s sort of a fitting choice for Nickel Boys, which is essentially a horror film. When we watch movies, we typically don’t pay attention to what the camera is or isn’t showing us; the assumption is that we’re seeing the whole picture. POV is different, as it constantly reminds us that there is an intentional choice being made of where the character is or isn’t looking. In horror movies, we scream at the soon to be axed cheerleader “Turn around, bitch!” Here that oppressive style works in much the same way, removing our ability to choose at the same time the characters’ ability to choose is curtailed. And yet the movie runs into the somewhat deadly problem of the technique constantly calling attention to itself, ironically oftentimes at the expense of identifying with the characters, the very thing it’s trying to achieve. Jonathan Demme, when discussing the making of The Silence of the Lambs, said that before entering full POV shots, he would build with increasingly tighter over-the-shoulder shots, so as not to overwhelm the audience. And then once you’re locked in, it feels as natural as it does terrifying. Nickel Boys is still a film worth seeing, but it unfortunately goes so hard on technique that it undermines its own goals.
Post-race: I voted for Obama, okay??