The line between fiction and non-fiction has always been blurry. As long as human beings, with our subjective points of view, are relating a true story, we can never be entirely sure how true to reality their telling is. Even documentaries, filmed on the ground as they happen, are at the mercy of editorial choices and artistic decisions. All of this is to say that documentary filmmakers often cross the barrier into fictional narrative features. The two formats are not as different as they might seem. One is a narrative you composed from the imagination, the other is a narrative you compose from what you've collected. Ramell Ross' 2018 Oscar nominated film "Hale County, This Morning This Evening" already straddled the line between doc and arthouse movie, showing life in a small town via a stream-of-conscious flow of footage. That probably made Ross' leap to what we think of as "regular" movies easier. His non-documentary debut, "Nickel Boys," is an adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead but also blends fact, fiction, and off-beat camerawork. Riding a wave of critical acclaim, the movie scored a surprise nomination for Best Picture this year.
Elwood Curtis is a bright young boy growing up in segregated, sixties Florida. As the civil rights movement heats up, Elwood quietly watches the resistance from white folks and considers warnings from his cautious grandmother – whose father and husband were victims of racial violence – not to get involved. Receiving acceptance into a tuition-free program at a black university, Elwood hitchhikes towards the school. He's picked up by a black man in a stolen car, the police quickly catching up with them. Assumed to be an accomplice, Elwood is arrested. Underage, he's taken to Nickel Academy, a private school for juvenile offenders. The school is heavily racially segregated, the black students often abused and even killed by the white staff. There, Elwood meets Turner, another introspective student/prisoner, and the two plot to escape the institute. Years later, an adult Elwood reflects on these events.
The first thing you'll notice about "Nickel Boys" is the way it's photographed. The film is shot almost entirely in first person perspective, the audience seeing the world as Elwood – and later Turner – see it. Sometimes, we assume the boys' point of view directly, the camera acting as their eyes. Other times, we float just behind a character's head, as if we are secretly peeking into their mind for a minute. The technique is somewhat disorientating but it's clear what Ross and cinematographer Jomo May are trying to do. "Nickel Boys" wants to put audiences – and, one assumes, white audiences especially – directly into the heads of these black children. We are not perceiving the events as a third party outsider. The film is attempting to put us there, as if we were experiencing these things ourselves. It's a canny way for Ross to avoid awards bait clichés of films about "black suffering," presented as guilt generating spectacle for largely white critical bodies. Instead, "Nickel Boys" functions much more like a memory of a historical event, endeavoring to make scenarios that might be thought of only as textbook passages instead as something far more personal.
Or maybe that's my white boy privilege getting in the way, my own born-in inability to see pass the racial boundaries I've always grown up around getting in the way of the artistic techniques Ross implements. I'm an idiot sometimes, so it's possible. What I can see is the way "Nickel Boys" captures the pacing of a memory. The film is narrative is often fragmented. It leaps between the two boys' viewpoints without warning. About an hour in, the film jumps ahead into the future when Elwood is an adult, signaled by a shot of a computer mouse. It took me a minute to catch up sometimes, especially amid the other artistic touches employed like flashing images or blurry camera work. However, this is how the human mind works. We don't remember events in a straight line. Little things will invoke a feeling from our past, otherwise unrelated events blossoming in our head. "Nickel Boys" does a good job of capturing that mental flow, giving us snapshots of what happens to these characters, some times out of order, to put us more thoroughly in this feeling.
Ross strikes me as a filmmaker driven more by emotion than technique or narrative. Whitehead's novel and the subsequent film are inspired by the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Florida that operated from 1900 to 2011. Hideous abuse went on all throughout that staggering lifetime, divided sharply along racial lines. The discovery of mass graves on the school grounds is not an invention of this fictionalization. Ross approaches the topic as sensitively as possible. The physical torture is only glimpsed, boys forced to spend time in a "sweat box" being the only brutality actually depicted on-screen. The sexual abuse is more than implied but is kept to suggestion. It's clear that the director was not looking to make a lurid melodrama out of these real life horrors. The historical is the personal for these characters and the real people that inspired them. "Nickel Boys" seeks to capture the emotional experience of that time and place, as recalled long after the obvious scars have healed by the worst questions linger on.
To that effect, smaller scenes become as devastating as any visceral depiction would be. Turner's mom visits the school, unable to see her son at the time, and gives Elwood a hug in his place. As an adult, he runs into a fellow survivor at a bar, the two having a conservation that slowly reveals how shattered the other man has been left by these scars. As in real life, small gestures and simple conversation often reveal the most upsetting truths, "Nickel Boys" getting tears out of the audience through understated scenes means more so than the melodrama we are more accompanied to in fiction. The performances and music all follow this direction, "Nickel Boys" operating as a story that keeps its heart close to its chest. Much the same way, one imagines, that the men who lived through similar events must do all throughout their lives.
This technique does not make "Nickel Boys" the most accessible of films. It took me about a half-hour to truly get on its dreamy wavelength and understand what it's doing. However, I think Ross and his team were ultimately successful in their goals. "Nickel Boys" is an attempt to approach historical atrocity in a way that dispels exploitation as much as possible, conveying to the viewer the experience of having lived through these events and be stuck with the memories, not defined by them but irrevocably changed by them. I'll admit, it's the type of motion picture I might be too dumb to understand. That the usually extremely middlebrow Academy embraced – in so much as two nominations can be described as "embraced" – something bolder and a little more experimental than your standard biopic is surprising, I'll admit. I'm not sure I totally caught everything "Nickel Boys" is trying to do but I'm impressed by its approach and left very interested to see what Ross might do next. [8/10]