Movie Review | Adaptation of Pulitzer-winning novel at times disorienting – Times-Standard

The site participated in an advanced screening of “Nickel Boys” in mid-November, I’ve seen numerous headlines and quotes extolling its brilliance and naming it one of the best films of the year.

Much of the praise garnered by the film stems from the bold choice to shoot it in first-person, with its two main characters alternating point-of-view characters at various points. That decision — credited in the film’s production notes to its director, RaMell Ross, and his co-writer, Joslyn Barnes, who is also a producer on the film — certainly helps “Nickel Boys” stand out, even among other works that explore this country’s history . racism.

Here’s the thing: I found the approach largely distracting—I just couldn’t see actors staring directly into the camera while delivering their lines, however deftly—and sometimes disorienting.

I really hope I’m in the minority, as “Nickel Boys” — an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Nickel Boys” — tells a powerful story inspired by the terrible passage over the years at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.

The film begins as the story of Elwood, portrayed as a young boy by Ethan Cole Sharp, but mostly narrated by Ethan Herisse. Raised by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor of “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat”) in the Jim Crow South, the young black man is about to begin his college education when his life is changed forever .

Despite having done nothing wrong beyond hitching a ride in a car he didn’t know had been stolen by the driver, he is sentenced to time in Nickel Academy, a reformatory that the viewer will come to see as a brutal place.

At Nickel, Elwood befriends another inmate, Brandon Wilson’s Turner, who gives him tips on surviving in this horrible environment and who becomes the second POV character. Elwood is much more optimistic and idealistic than Turner, clinging to the dream of a better life away from this prison where the punishments sometimes rise beyond the level of pure cruelty.

Realizing that dream won’t be easy, though a determined Hattie is saving money to pay for a lawyer to speak on his behalf.

“Nickel Boys” offers yet another version of Elwood, as an adult (Daveed Diggs) living far away from the prison in New York City, trying to live a life while carrying the memories and trauma of his time there. However, he still can’t really escape Nickel Academy after several unmarked graves are found at the site.

Early in this piece, I used the word “distracting” to describe the way “Nickel Boys” was shot, and the POV style got in the way a bit of my appreciation of the acting in the film. That said, Herisse (“The American Society of Magical Negroes”) and Wilson (“The Way Back”) make it easy to get behind Elwood and Turner, respectively, and Diggs (“Hamilton,” “Blindspotting”) can’t avoid being interesting on the screen – even when shot steadily from behind.

I also used the word “disorienting” which describes the film’s climactic few minutes where the events mirror those of the book. Keep an eye on them to follow them accurately.

It feels, well, wrong to wish that a filmmaker would have taken a less daring approach, but that’s what I found myself doing when I experienced “Nickel Boys” and thought of the work here by Ross — whose other feature is the 2018 Academy Award-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” billed in the “Nickel Boys” materials as an “impressionistic twist on the lives of black people in the American South.”

Hopefully your experience will be completely different than mine when you watch “Nickel Boys.” And watch it you should, as it’s another painful reminder of the kind of actions men are capable of when driven by hatred and prejudice.

“This is only one place,” Turner tells Elwood, who then delivers the line that has stuck with me since mid-November.

“There are nickels all over the country.”

“Nickel Boys” is rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking.