Flawed Artistic Adaptation Of Whitehead Novel

I consumed Barry Jenkins’ 10-part limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad over the course of a weekend because, basically, I couldn’t stop. It was extraordinary storytelling and filmmaking, if harrowing in its uncompromising depiction of slavery. Whitehead followed that book up with The Nickel Boys in 2019, and like Underground Railroad, won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Based on this, I looked forward to the film version, its title shortened to simply Nickel Boys, especially since it also came from Plan B., producers of The Underground Railroad and Oscar-winning Best Pictures 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight. As it turns out, shortening the title wasn’t the only change in the RaMell Ross screen version that just had its world premiere this weekend at the Telluride Film Festival and will also be opening the New York Film Festival.

Admittedly a difficult book to transfer its rhythms to a different medium, Ross takes a poetic and impressionistic swing in his first narrative feature which actually does have much in common with his 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a beloved film with a large following. That movie’s visual style got him the notice that led to being hired to direct and adapt (joined later by Joslyn Barnes) Nickel Boys, and it works to some advantage as well as disadvantage. I have to admit watching this overlong (at two hours and 20 minutes — and it feels it) artistic take, I kept thinking more Terrence Malick than necessarily Colson Whitehead. In the end, it is the product of Ross more than anything else, his artistic sensibility tacked on to what he got out of the novel.

Here’s the disadvantage: he made one major change in adapting it to a visual medium, and while not necessarily a fatal one for some, it could well limit the audience beyond adoring critics who tend to look away at a more conventional take. That would be a shame because, content-wise, this is a very important subject, a relevant one and a heartbreaking journey, but shooting in a POV-style, with the camera in on one person talking to another who is only heard but not seen off camera, gets very repetitive. It is a dangling conversation approach that goes quickly from being intriguing to being annoying, pointing to artifice rather than serving the story. It threw me out of the movie. Others may not mind but the point Ross was trying to make in using this device so often was distracting at best. I hope it doesn’t prevent some audiences from getting the larger point that we should be talking about.

Whitehead’s story is inspired by the Dozier School, a Florida reform school that was in business for 111 years and had a horrifying history in the Jim Crow south. Authorities eventually discovered 100 unmarked graves, the resting place of many unreported deaths that occurred there due to unimaginable treatment, violent, sexually and otherwise, to the boys, particularly Black youths, sent there. In Nickel Boys we meet enthusiastic and studious young man Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a hopeful soul, who despite more dire circumstances is trying to lift himself up, even with uninspiring white teachers. One particularly haunting scene early on sees him quietly flipping the pages of a recycled book from a past white student who had drawn a flipbook-style depiction of a lynching on the bottom of every page.

Elwood is proud to have been accepted at a college but in a life-altering twist of fate accepts a ride from a man who gets stopped by cops because it was a stolen car. They immediately charge Elwood and send him to Nickel Academy, a fictional version of Dozier. There he meets the far more cynical, less wide-eyed Turner (Brandon Wilson) and they form a friendship, but it is a rocky road indeed as the film spans the early ’60s to 2010, with three different actors playing Elwood during the course of the film (Daveed Diggs is the older version but the actual identity is a story point that won’t be revealed here). Rather than being driven by more linear plot development, Ross lets it play out in more melancholy fashion, often in banal ways, but also intercutting a lot of archival footage from Martin Luther King Jr. to Apollo 8 (you can’t take the documentarian out of Ross in this film), mixed with a busy sound design ala Malick but minimal score. It’s a mixed bag.

Curiously, at two points in his film, Ross runs scenes (including its opening credits) from Stanley Kramer’s brilliant Oscar-winning 1958 black-and-white classic, The Defiant Ones, in which Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are chained together before making a joint escape. This is meant somehow as a putdown on the way Hollywood has told Black stories in the past, or if it is some sort of connection Ross sees to the one he is telling here, it wasn’t clear to me, at least. But maybe that’s the point.

Acting-wise, both lead actors Herisse and Wilson playing their characters Elwood and Turner for the bulk of the film, are excellent in every respect. So too is the great Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandma, even if she doesn’t get as much screen time as you would like, and with most of that forcing her to deliver her lines straight to camera and those unseen people on the other side.

Props to Ross for taking artistic leaps and big risks, even if, for me at least, they don’t completely pay off. It will provoke conversation at a time when racism has reared its ugly head again, this time with some at the highest levels of government. At the very least it has inspired me to go out and get Whitehead’s book, and maybe even take another look at The Defiant Ones.

Producers are Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and David Levine.

Title: Nickel Boys

Festival: Telluride Film Festival

Distributor: MGM/ Orion Films

Director: RaMell Ross

Screenplay: RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjunue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger

Rating: PG13

Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes

Release Date: October 25, 2024