(IMAGE: Amazon MGM Studios)
Amazon MGM Studios. 2024. Drama. 140 minutes.
RATING: 4 out of 4
When RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County, This Morning, This Evening debuted in 2018, it wasn’t just apparent we were witnessing the promise of new talent. Ross spoke with a new voice — another way of seeing. His sumptuous and unexpected compositions frame for the marginalized elements of the action he records: shadowplay on the wall, a discarded child’s toy, the drops of sweat that hit the floor as the basketball bounces — all the stuff more conventional creators would frame out. His world bursts with anecdotal detail, a poeticized reality that’s simultaneously closer to and more recognizable as our own. Traditionalist creators curate and constrain what the camera finds, where Ross searches out the eloquence of the eliminated detail. Watching his films, we continually catch our breath at the beauty he sees in things other cameras overlook.
Because he’s an African American filmmaker (Ross was born in Germany into a military family and raised in Fairfax, Virginia), and because he tells African American stories, Ross’ focus on the vivid details of life outside the frame takes on additional nuance and relevance. In American cinema, Black lives have been lived almost wholly outside the frame. The Black story has almost always been marginalized, in ways reflective less of the human experience than how white people in the dominant culture wanted/needed to see Blackness at any given historical moment.
In what are still per capita the two most ticket-selling movies ever made, we have the cinema’s twin original sins: Black people are monsters from the id bent on “race mixing” in Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and then docile, loyal, slow-witted, and happy to be enslaved in Selznick’s Gone With the Wind. Savage and child-like, submissive and servile, the Black characters in “Golden Age” Hollywood suffer indignity upon indignity, carefully crafted to undermine the very idea of Black strength. Black eyes roll and pop, Black voices stammer and groan, Black skin turns powder white when a Black face (always mistakenly) thinks it’s seen a ghost. And when an undeniable icon of Black strength inexplicably manifested at MGM under the name Lena Horne, she was constricted inside “specialty” musical numbers that could be excised from prints shown in the Deep South, lest racist white people be confronted by an irrevocable image of excellence in a complexion unlike their own.
The liberal vision of Blackness that took hold during the Civil Rights era had its limits too. When Sidney Poitier showed up to ask for white actress Catherine Houghton’s hand in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, he came to Spencer Tracy’s table as a doctor who was: a magna cum laude graduate of Johns Hopkins; a Yale professor; a noted author of numerous books; and the assistant director of the World Health Organization. As a counterweight, Houghton offered up her dewy young whiteness, and the film argued almost directly that this balanced the scale against its Black Superman, because Poitier played the character who had to prove he was worthy. As American Fiction so brilliantly pointed out last year, contemporary liberalism embeds Black identity inside of “problem” dramas — by revisiting slavery, or fetishizing (while claiming to expose the gritty realities of) gang culture, and or drug culture. No wonder when Spike Lee entered our consciousness forever with his debut She’s Gotta Have It he included in his end credits the line “THIS FILM CONTAINS NO JERRI CURLS!!! AND NO DRUGS!!!” — all caps, and underscored.
Deeply aware of this long, layered and problematic history as he makes his narrative debut, Ross takes a bravura approach in Nickel Boys, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning fictionalization of life during the Jim Crow era inside the all too real Dozier School, a “reformatory,” where young Black men were tortured and even routinely murdered for over 111 years. In logline form, that sounds like another movie about Black suffering, and Nickel Boys partially is, because Black suffering is a recurring skein in the Black experience of America, and Black stories are the stories Ross currently tells. But daringly, and abetted by the brilliant cinematographer Jomo Fray (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), Ross has shot his entire film using a seamless subjective camera technique that moves in and out of the consciousness of protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herrise); and Turner (Brandon Wilson), Elwood’s best friend inside Nickel Academy. Through this skilled collaborative craft, Nickel Boys mostly evades and even refutes the “torture porn” mechanics gaudier filmmakers (looking at you, Quentin) have stumbled against within what I’ll loosely call “the genre.”
Subjective camera, in which the lens shows the point of view of a character in a movie, has a long and ignominious history in cinema when used as anything other than a showy flourish. First tried at feature length by actor/director Robert Montgomery for the 1947 detective noir Lady in the Lake, the “gimmick” was so poorly received the film allegedly ended Montgomery’s Hollywood career. The technique frequently baffled textbook greats, including Orson Welles (whose first film at RKO was to have been a subjective camera version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, not Citizen Kane) and Alfred Hitchcock (those embarrassing shots in Notorious where Ingrid Bergman’s hair flutters in front of the lens to add ‘suspense” to a drunken car ride mar an otherwise nearly perfect film). But Ross, whose camera already drifts toward the meaningful detail in a way that reflects how a human mind operates, manages to make this usually showy technique feel natural and lived in, virtually inventing a tactic that permits on screen the way a fine novel like Whitehead’s can filter a narrative entirely through the drifting wavelengths of character consciousness.
It’s not an empty stunt. Ross is trying to honor his source material, but he’s also short-circuiting the entire history of the Hollywood “problem drama” and the way it utilizes the Black experience to create a spectacle of suffering. It’s too crude to say we “become” the character when we see everything from a vantage point, but what does happen is that we’re denied the spectacle of predicament almost all movies venerate. We move through the lives of Elwood and Turner the way they move through them — hesitantly, overhearing things, piecing together their situation in attentive fits and starts. We don’t “see” them, except as they see each other. What happens to them happens to us.
Elwood and Turner spend much of Nickel Boys in a state of naive grace on the plantation-like grounds of Nickel Academy, finding the beauty in their immediate surroundings, the poetry in landscape and air. The world as they see it is full of signs and wonders, of stories unwritten but suggested by detail. In perhaps the most haunting image of this ravishing and image gorged film, Elwood and Turner stumble onto a lush oak tree that turns out to be a (possibly abandoned) torture site. A rusted chain coils on the ground like a snake, and the steel eye holes embedded in the bark to tie off restraints have been absorbed into the trunk by time and growth in a way that makes them seem almost harmless, even beautified. It’s an oddly healing image of horror, encapsulating Ross’ entire message, which blends remembrance with hope.
Nickel Boys is remarkable, rule-breaking and ravishing cinema, and its advent announces the full arrival of a major cinematic talent of the first rank.
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