By Mark Fields
Film Adaptation of Prize-Winning Novel Gets in Way of Powerful Story
Novelist Colson Whitehead is one of only four authors to ever win two Pulitzer Prizes (for The Underground Railroad in 2017 and The Nickel Boys in 2020). Both are powerful novels that take inventive yet pointed looks at racism in America. The Underground Railroad was adapted into a gripping TV limited series in 2021. Nickel Boys is the new film adaptation of his later book. Unfortunately, director-screenwriter RaMell Ross elected to superimpose his own cinematic noodlings onto Whitehead’s story of teens facing the abuses of a Jim Crow-era Florida detention center. Ross’ auteurish embellishments sadly diminish the impact of the narrative.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson play Elwood and Turner. Told mostly from Elwood’s perspective, the film follows his promising early life and his aspirations for higher education. Falsely accused of a crime and sent to reform school practically without defense, Elwood struggles to adjust to his dire surroundings and strikes up a friendship with a fellow prisoner. Based on a real institution within a well-known American phenomenon, Nickel Boys could have been a harrowing account of friendship forged from adversity as Elwood and Turner face severe deprivation and grueling punishments, and yet try to find moments of joy to escape the grim conditions.
Inexplicably, director Ross opts to tell this story largely through first-person POV camera work, which gives us Elwood’s perspective on the action but robs of us of any sense of his reaction. That POV strangely shifts to other characters later in the film (perhaps Ross sensed the limitations of this approach). He also interjects other images into the story, many from the fledgling space program that is unfolding at the same point in history. The juxtaposition of tremendous scientific progress with the regressive events at Nickel School is apt, but the cross-editing technique lacks subtlety and distracts from Elwood’s experiences. There are other interstitial images – as well as jarring camera work and a series of scenes with an older Elwood (shot from behind him!) that are equally distracting.
Both Herisse and Wilson are expressively actors to the extent that Ross will allow them to be. They largely carry the film with support from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (as Elwood’s devoted grandmother), Daveed Diggs, and Hamish Linklater.
Having read and appreciated the source novel, I wanted to like this movie far more than I actually did. Instead of being pulled into Elwood’s tragic story, I was instead pushed away by a director who wouldn’t trust his material.
