RaMell Ross's first film, 2018's lyrical documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, found a new way of looking at American life; at once dreamy yet sharp-eyed, it was that rare example of non-fiction where the camera, liberated from stubborn objectivity, felt like an observer with its own distinct personality. In Ross's first stab at literary adaptation - the already much-praised Nickel Boys, drawn from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel - that gaze persists, for better and worse. The new film represents a revival of the first-person camera perspective, which is to say that almost everything we see is observed from the viewpoint of Whitehead's protagonist Elwood Curtis. Occasionally, we catch Elwood himself (played first by Ethan Cole Sharp, then by Ethan Herisse) reflected in a window or mirror. Mostly we're looking through the eyes of a young Black lad growing up in the America of the early 1960s. We look up at the family Christmas tree and the adults crowded around the poker table; we look at a TV showing a Martin Luther King speech; we look towards adoring grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), noting the love in her eyes; and we look on at the cruelties of the reform school system Elwood is forced to negotiate. What's impressive is how quickly this approach takes and sticks. Partly it's our familiarity with this perspective, gained if not from such first-person oddities as 1946's Lady in the Lake, then from the kill scenes in slasher movies and, more recently, the comic business of TV's Peep Show. Partly it's because Nickel Boys affords us time to get used to it. Crucially, it never seems a forced perspective, because Ross shoots a lot of casual, everyday, even bitty-seeming material, the kind of spots and vignettes that made up his previous film: a school brochure sliding down a fridge door, pencils stuck in a classroom ceiling, a thread being wrapped tightly around a thumb. The film's opening stretch is basically collaging formative memories, but it also goes to our recognition of Elwood as a restless, curious, distractible soul. Having Robbie Williams played by a CG chimp is a gimmick (or at best a USP), because it doesn't finally tell us anything new. (Not least as nobody in Better Man ever mentions the fact.) The camera perspective here is a tool, because it opens something up.
For starters: an idea of physical and emotional growth, and the threats to same. Yes, it helps that this camera is initially knee-high to a grasshopper and literally rises scene by scene. But it also allows us, from time to time, to look Elwood's white oppressors squarely in the eye, and to observe in close-up someone who denies your existence or truly, plainly hates you. It's not just that Nickel Boys teaches us how to watch it, it's that it teaches us how to read individual images and clusters of images and figure out - as Elwood himself comes to figure out - exactly what they mean. The aim is to bring the viewer (and, I suspect, the non-Black viewer in particular) closer to the experience of what it is to be Black in a systematically racist America, and the film's most effective sequences compress the distance between camera, character and viewer to such an extent that these three elements become one. Formally, then, Nickel Boys is nothing if not ambitious. For some while, though, what we're actually looking at (never mind the perspective, for a minute) is visually pretty conventional: a handsomely appointed, awards-ready period coming-of-age saga that also doubles as a parable of Black endurance and survival. That opening stretch is quietly radical rather than fervently revolutionary, mindful of an assumed awards-season audience it doesn't want to alienate or throw off. Having got us comfortable in Elwood's shoes, however, Ross begins to take bolder, lengthier strides: interruptions to the timeline (flashforwards that envision a future of some kind for these characters), deviations from the established POV (other bodies, other shoes, other positions in space). The movie grows as Elwood grows, in other words, assuming greater formal complexity, but its perspective fragments. Suddenly, we see Elwood Now set alongside an Elwood of the future (Daveed Diggs), burdened with a sense of Elwood Then, and Ross's boundless empathy - and editorial skill - ensures the film does right by all these iterations.
Again, much about Nickel Boys is impressive indeed. If I held onto one lingering reservation, though - and only more tightly through the second half, which means I can't quite frame Ross's film as the readymade masterpiece some have - it's the failure or unwillingness to articulate a clear and precise understanding of the horrors of the Nickel Academy, and of the wider society that enables it. I can but whisper this, in the face of some of the season's most rapturous reviews, but Nickel Boys does seem an insistently tasteful adaptation of Whitehead's book - doubly so, if you were to set it against the memory of Barry Jenkins' overlooked Prime Video adaptation of the same author's The Underground Railroad, with its searing, unforgettable images, or Peter Mullan's fierce, often unrestrained The Magdalene Sisters, on comparable subject matter. Those works had fire in their bellies, which was sporadically allowed to rage across the screen and illuminate, but Nickel Boys proves an altogether slower, more controlled burn; you sense Ross never wants to scald the viewer (or reopen old scars), which is honourable, if something of an artistic limitation. Those rave reviews are clearly responding to that delicacy, to Ross's thoughtful, careful handling, and these are inarguably among the film's qualities, but this retelling supposes on some fundamental existential level that the worst brutalities of an oppressive society forever exist just out of sight or within PG-13 guidelines, which demonstrably isn't the case. (We might do well to trust the evidence of our own eyes on this one, but even Steve McQueen's 12A-rated Blitz, which the same critics sniffed at en masse, snuck so much more context into each frame.) Ross's dreaminess clouds and softens Elwood's gaze: from these images, I got that the kid's classmates were dying off, but never really how or why. The consolation, and this has clearly been enough for most early responders, is that this camera sees so much else besides: at the very least, Nickel Boys demonstrates how one tweak or rethink of the directorial line of approach can imbue what might otherwise have been another museum piece with bruising, moving, galvanising lived experience. Even if it doesn't see everything, it still sees more than most.
Nickel Boys opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.
