Nickel Boys (2024)

PG-13 for horrific acts due to racists being, once again, terrible.  There's some language, especially when it comes to hate speech.  But a lot of this is stuff that happens behind the scenes.  The film is shot in first person, so the audience is limited to what the boys actually witness.  There's also some alcoholism and potential molestation, although that is left a bit ambiguous.

DIRECTOR:  RaMell Ross

I so wish that I read the book before seeing the movie.  I was this close to getting it from the library, but I dismissed the idea as stressful.  I have a million books that I own that I wanted to get through first.  But now, seeing what I've seen, I want to see why RaMell Ross chose to do what he did.  Also, once again, I'm very stressed to write this.  If I can knock this out in the next half-hour, I will be incredibly happy with myself and try to give myself a gold star.  It won't clear my "To-Do" list, but it will get me significantly closer.

My wife sewed some doubt into my head. She's a very smart lady, my wife.  Because we're two separate people (although with the whole marriage making two people one, you could argue...), we disagree on some things. But often, our tastes tend to align, especially when it comes to high art cinema.  Superhero stuff we can disagree on all day.  But when it comes to Oscar stuff, we tend to agree.  She planted this seed in my head and it is causing me to doubt what I watched.  See, I watched Nickel Boys and, for the most part, I thought I loved it.  I'll get to the why in a second.  But she said that she wanted to like it and now I'm thinking that I might be in the same camp.

I mean, I know I liked it more than she did.  While I liked the story and thought that the tale was a story that needed telling, I really fell in love with the visuals of the whole movie.  Like I mentioned in the MPA section above, the film is told in first person.  Ross goes beyond that, messing with the chronology of the movie.  As such, the movie forces its audience to stay engaged.  Often in the movie, there are moments when you have to question whose perspective you are getting, Elwood's or Turner's.  Now, as I type that, it makes a ton of sense why the perspective is always switching.  I'm going to be spoiling the end of the movie right now, so you can quit reading if you haven't seen the movie yet.  The notion that Elwood and Turner's perspectives keep jumping all over the place is because Turner is Elwood.  I figured it out about twenty minutes before the reveal.  That has nothing to do with the quality of the movie.  I just want the applause.

First person narratives are tricky.  Nickel Boys is not the first movie to play with the first person narrative.  These movies tend to be more novelties than anything else.  The only one that touched me as much as Nickel Boys did was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  But the use of the first person narrative kind of works for Nickel Boys as Nickel Boys reminds us of something that is almost metatextual.  Again, my wife is very smart.  She did point out that there tends to be a movie like Nickel Boys every year.  It's kind of a crime that stories about race in America have been relegated to Oscar bait.  They should get the attention of the Oscar, but it sucks that people kind of treat them as a throwaway term like "Oscar Bait."  But Nickel Boys is almost --and in only a subtle way --commenting on that.  

The use of the first person, at least from my read, is the notion that the story of Elwood and Turner is the story of Black America.  There has been this tendency for an audience to distance themselves from the protagonist of a story, especially when it comes to racial discrimination. Perhaps the reason that we keep coming back to this well of systematic racism is that we don't get that there's something universal about the experience for Black America.  It's always kind of treated with the experience for the other.  Do I think that I felt like a Black American feeling the racial prejudice of police indifference?  No.  But do I get the logic of having people looking right at me and saying the most awful thing, assuming that I was doing wrong thing?  Intellectually, I get it.

When I put my chips on the table, what the first person perspective does is more along the lines of offering me cool shots.  There were a stream of films (my brain isn't braining right now) that used the mundane to cover up the fact that horrors were happening in the next room.  Again, brain not braining, but the closest thing I can think of right now is The Zone of Interest.  There is something gorgeous about seeing how normal life is when this overwhelming moments are encroaching on these characters.  Ross keeps setting up his characters in moments of almost boredom.  The beginning of the movie, Elwood is hearing the argument in the other room about what is going to happen to him when it comes to getting sent to Nickel Academy.  He's not pacing.  There's no desperation to get away or to flee.  Instead, he's staring at his arm as the light hits it.  There's a certain verisimilitude that comes with those kind of moments.  Nothing feels play-acty because real life is powering through those miserable moments in quiet silence.

On top of using the first person perspective, there are haunting images of history passing.  Now, I'm sure someone who was sitting there and taking notes could point out the importance of each image.  What I got, as someone who wasn't taking notes, was an intention to disrupt the scene with the grander imposition of history in the background.  You would think that every image that we saw would somehow tie into racial history.  (I suppose all history is racial history.  But I'm talking about stuff like marathon runners moving backwards.  I could see the metaphor about turning back progress and regressing as a people, but that was one image out of a billion.)  The movie kept on showing an allegator, often appearing out of a place it should not be.  It's cool imagery and I could attribute meaning to many of these images.  For example, the idea of danger appearing where it is least expected could be part of that.

But I'm also a guy who writes a film blog and gets content out of unpacking every visual choice.  I'm actively trying to ascribe meaning to every shot that Nickel Boys presented to me.  I don't know if a lot of people were doing that kind of heavy lifting.  I mean, I don't know a ton of people who went out and saw Nickel Boys. (I now own this movie, by the way.  Maybe I'll watch it again down the line.  Heck, maybe I'll read the book and then teach it in the future.) Again, there is the intention of the choice and the actual result of that choice.  I do believe that Ross may have chosen these images to have deeper significance juxtaposed to the narrative moments in the film.  But what the actual result is just a general sense of artiness.  The movie has a general arty vibe to it.  That's not a bad thing.  In fact, it might be my favorite element of the movie.

I told you that I predicted the switcheroo at the end.  I saw that Elwood was too pure to exist in this world.  It would have been even more odd if Turner died.  (I guessed that Turner and Elwood switched places when Turner died because no one would mention him in the flash-forwards.)   But if that little seed that my wife planted in my head is sprouting, does the switch make sense?  I do like the idea that Turner had to stay off the grid.  I get that he chose Elwood's name as a tribute to this kid that he loved and got killed.  I understand all that. But also, it feels like a fictional choice.  That doesn't feel like reality.  I spoke of verisimilitude a minute ago.  It feels like something an artsy film would do.  It played on the idea that nonchronological narratives eliminate certain choices and the film chose to do the oddest ending it could.

The problem is that Nickel Boys doesn't need a twist.  There have been a bunch of stories told about the roles that juvenile detention centers did to minorities.  It's not just juvenile detention centers.  Sugarcane told about religious schools in Canada who were wiping out the Indigenous population that had registered to be students there. The story already flies without the need for there to be a switch.  Again, I think I like this movie a lot.  I'm all for it.  But I don't think that there's been a movie twist that had less of an impact on me than simply having one character adopt the other character's moniker.  The movie is good enough.  There is a visual artistry coupled with a compelling character dynamic to make this story work without the big reveal.

After unpacking the movie (to the best of my exhausted ability), I do think that my wife's seed isn't accurate.  I do like the movie a lot.  I don't know if I would ever put it on a "love" list though.  While it is one of the better movies that the Oscars offered up this year, it is a weaker year for Oscars.  Honestly, in other years, Nickel Boys would kind of be forgotten as simply a pretty movie.  I'll be honest.  I'm kind of surprised that it isn't up for Cinematography.  That's where I think that this movie shines the hardest.  But it is a good story and I'm still interested in reading the book.  Maybe Goodreads can manipulate me into reading it because it is one of their reading challenge books.  Still, the story works, even if it didn't need the twist ending.