Tropic Sprockets / The Nickel Boys

By Ian Brockway

From RaMell Ross, “The Nickel Boys” is an adaptation of the novel by Colson Whitehead. It is impactful, eccentric, and startling. [Showtimes and trailer at Tropiccinema.com.]  Though it is challenging and overly long in length, the film is unsettling, engrossing and resists easy classification. It has just received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Through kaleidoscopic flashbacks, it illustrates the story of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharpe) who gets picked up and taken to a sadistic reform school, mistaken for a criminal in Kafkaesque circumstances. Elwood is a gifted academic with elevated opinions, yet he becomes savagely abused, disappointed and beaten down.

He meets Turner (Brandon Wilson) who is cynical and nonchalant, telling him not to get his hopes up in life.

The film is immediately off-center given that we are unsure as to the exact perspective of the film itself. Gradually it becomes clear that for the first half of the film, one is concerned with Elwood. Then, the second half focuses on Turner.

One rarely sees the face of Elwood. Instead, the people ahead of him are visible, the ones who belittle him, berate him, and abuse him physically. As in a film by Stan Brakhage, the audience sees imposing malevolent shadows, the march of heavy shoes, a jaundice-yellow floor, a pockmarked ceiling skewered with pencils and a slanted door. All elements lead to pain, sadism, and sadness.

The two attempt to plan an escape but the odds are against them.

Deliberately dense, scary, and chock full of images, the film’s technique may labor a viewer’s patience, but it remains laser focused in its witness of sadness, evil and unpredictable Mystery. The story is based on the Dozier School that operated as a house of torture in Marianna, Florida for 111 years.

Harsh and disquieting, “The Nickel Boys” is an unusual film, containing the imagistic detail and emotion of literature.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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