'Nickel Boys' and Who Gets Seen
RaMell Ross' first-person camera isn't a gimmick; it's thematically essential to his powerful film.
When you see a film as visually daring as Nickel Boys, it can be tempting to dismiss its techniques as overreaching or contrived. In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, director and co-writer RaMell Ross employs a first-person camera for his characters. Almost everything we see is from the direct perspective of our two lead characters, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). For some, this radical approach may be doomed to backfire. After all, how can we appreciate Herisse and Wilson’s performances if we can’t see their faces? Isn’t Ross chipping away at his actors’ work by allowing us only to hear their voices and capture their field of vision?
The tradeoffs here are essential for how Ross wants to tell this story. The film follows two teenagers imprisoned at the Nickel Academy, a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. Elwood is a sharp student wrongly convicted as an accessory to a crime, but inside Nickel, he bonds with Turner. The Academy is only a microcosm of the world’s larger ills, with the students segregated along racial lines, the white students receiving privileges and benefits while the Black students are relegated to convict labor.
A lesser storyteller would fall back into the larger injustice of it all and render Elwood and Turner as case studies of a failed system. Ross, however, chooses to make his story intimate, and in this way, he conveys a deeper well of humanity than a polemic that would only reinforce what audiences already know. The film’s largest concern isn’t the racial divides in America but rather when that gulf becomes so deep that we no longer see the people who fall into it.
Nickel Boys is about the act of looking and the power of being seen. By rooting the story through Elwood and Turner’s perspectives, Nickel Boys transcends being a period piece where audiences can say, “Well, that was a problem, but we solved it.” Think about how many people are incarcerated in America. Think about how many of those incarcerated people are Black men. Think about how depictions of Black men reduce them down to their crimes compared to White criminals, who can only be misguided innocents. In this way, Black men become a statistic at best and dead or forgotten at worst.
In Elwood and Turner’s journey, the fate they’re fighting against is to be nothing more than a Black body in a white world. Within this framework, Ross has to do something radical to tell the story, and that’s why employing the POV camera is such a genius move. It’s a way to connect so fiercely with these characters that we go inside their minds. It’s to catch their glances, the little things they see, and how their vision lingers. This is a counterintuitive approach but also a necessary one to show both the isolation of these characters as well as what happens when they connect with another person.
When Elwood and Turner first meet, the movie opens up and shows us the power of connection even in the darkest of places. We’re being told, “The world at large may not see these young men, but they see each other.” It shows a bond that the world cannot steal. This is not, “Prison is the friends we made along the way,” but rather that for men who were discarded and forgotten by the world, seen as nothing more than disposable labor for white supremacist culture, they know they’re so much more. For a world that does not see them, they see each other.
Could you tell the story of Nickel Boys without the first-person camera? Of course, but that omniscient camera would struggle to capture the same kind of intimacy and internal emotions. Some may argue that this approach shortchanges Herisse and Wilson, but since they’re witnessing each other, both men have a chance to shine on camera. They are not meaningless ciphers like in the first-person actioner Hardcore Henry or video game characters subject to a player’s whims. If anything, the first-person camera conveys a longing to be seen, one that can only be completed when Elwood and Turner come into each other’s lives.
That connection and the power of being far more than a body or a number or even a critique of American inequality is what makes Nickel Boys so potent. The film asks us to note the camera, to note the point of view, and then challenges us, the viewer, to think about who we choose to see and who we ignore. Who gets left at the margins, and if instead of ignoring those people, we choose to look closer, we can see far more than our narrow lens typically observes.
Nickel Boys is now playing in theaters in limited release.