Chuck Wilson
Nickel Boys, filmmaker RaMell Ross’s brilliant adaptation (with co-writer Joslyn Barnes) of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, is the story of Elwood Curtis, an African American boy growing up in Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s Jim Crow South, a place of prejudice and restriction. But Elwood is a young man who sees possibilities, not limitations, and from the very first shot — Elwood lying on the grass, looking up at an orange tree and at a leaf he’s twirling in his fingers — Ross means to show us exactly how Elwood perceives the world around him. We see the leaf and tree and the sky and Elwood’s young hand, but we won’t see his face for a long time, and even then only as he sees it, in reflected glimpses.
In high school, through no fault of his own, Elwood will be sent to a brutally abusive boys reformatory, but before that cruel turn of events he’s portrayed as a 13-year-old boy (Ethan Cole Sharp) of spirit and curiosity, being raised by his grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Elwood often goes with Hattie to her job as a housekeeper at a fancy hotel, and we observe her workday through her grandson’s eyes: on her knees sweeping up a broken dish in a restaurant full of white patrons and then standing up to give Elwood a half nod, as if to say, “This does not matter. We are not this.” Riding the bus into town, Elwood watches as two Black boys step off the sidewalk and into the street and then jump back onto the sidewalk, all in one fluid, familiar motion: They are getting out of the way for a white couple walking toward them.
Life is serious, but Elwood is awake to everyday symmetries and pleasures, from the round heft of an orange to the glory of three sisters walking hand in hand in front of him. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray appear to exult in such images, as if trying to make up for cinema’s tendency to emphasize the pain in everyday Black lives rather than its joys. Later, on a different bus ride, seated in the back, a little girl in a yellow sundress comes sliding up from between Elwood’s feet. As he looks down in surprise, she offers him a wave and a smile. “Where did you come from?” a delighted Elwood asks.
At 16, Elwood, now played by Ethan Herisse, is encouraged by a young teacher (Jimmie Fails) to enroll in a nearby Black college offering classes to gifted high school students. It’s a life-changing opportunity, but after hitching a ride in a sleek blue Impala that proves to be stolen, Elwood is arrested and sentenced to Nickel Academy, a state-run reform school. Whitehead’s fictional Nickel is based on the Dozier School for Boys, in Marianna, Florida, which existed for over 100 years and where a vast burial site of young bodies was unearthed, in 2012.
The night before he leaves, Elwood finds Hattie at the dining room table, icing a cake she’s making special for him. Talking to herself as she pulls excess icing off the cake knife with her fingers — as a Southern cook will do — Hattie appears to be slicing pieces of cake for all the men taken from her, including her daddy, who was accused, fatally, of not getting out of the way of a white woman. Determined that her grandson will survive when others did not, Hattie will eventually travel hours to visit Elwood at Nickel and spend all her money seeking his release. In all of her scenes, Ellis-Taylor gazes directly into the camera — at Elwood and at us. It’s an extraordinary performance.
At Nickel, Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), who laughs at El’s earnestness even as he takes him under his wing. Turner is on his second stint at Nickel and knows its secrets, from the brutal beatings that occur in “the White House” to what happens to those who enrage the superintendent (Hamish Linklater). They are “taken out back,” and never return.
Herisse and Wilson do fine work in roles that must have presented complex technical challenges. In their first scene, meeting at the lunch table, Ross flips the film’s POV, and suddenly, through Turner’s eyes, we see Elwood’s face and body in full for the first time. As the two become friends, the film’s perspective continually shifts from Elwood’s viewpoint to Turner’s and then back again. It’s disorienting at times, to be sure, but then so is Nickel, every second of the day.
For trying to stop a fight, Elwood is sent to the White House, in a harrowing sequence most notable for what it does not show — Black bodies being beaten and traumatized. Instead, the terror comes from the loud and terrible thrum of an unseen machine meant to drown out screams and from the awful death-house decay of the outer room in which Elwood is made to wait his turn. Elwood, who can find beauty most anywhere, can’t settle on a place to rest his eyes. There is no respite in these terrible rooms.
At the end of Nickel Boys you may not be sure whose experiences are being depicted: Elwood’s or Turner’s? See the film again and you might still have questions, but at Nickel, it would seem, life histories merge. A boy survives the school’s terrors and becomes a man and pulls another’s history along with him. In this way, perhaps, each boy lives on. ❖
Chuck Wilson is a Los Angeles–based writer who has written for the L.A. Weekly for over 25 years and has been a longtime contributor to the Village Voice.