RaMell Ross (2024)
I haven’t read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019) or seen RaMell Ross’s widely-praised documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). Watching Ross’s dramatisation of Whitehead’s novel may be a very different experience for those familiar with the source material or Ross’s film-making signature or both: I found Nickel Boys mostly maddening, sometimes incomprehensible. As storytellers, Ross and Joslyn Barnes, who shares the screenplay credit with him, seem to have elided much more than the book title’s definite article.
I gather Colson Whitehead uses a third-person narrative; Ross tells the story from a ‘first-person point of view’ (Wikipedia). This belongs less to either of the main characters (or any other character) than to an often juddering hand-held camera: it’s POV as the expression of technique rather than the perceptions of a personality. Two examples. A group of African-American lads, inmates of the Nickel Academy reform school, sit round a table eating together. Ross and his DP, Jomo Fray, show the faces of all but one of the boys but the latter’s voice is heard along with the other voices. A couple of screen minutes later, the scene is replayed; this time, the boy not seen in the previous version is on camera and his main interlocutor is not. The dialogue is unchanged and the same goes for the other boys’ reactions, except that they’re now seen from a different camera angle. The reprise gives the viewer nothing s/he wouldn’t have got from the first version of the scene had Ross not excluded from it one of the main faces in the story. In the second example, the camera records action on the far side of a swimming pool. As a white woman walks away, a young Black man removes his trousers before sitting down poolside and dangling his legs in the water. At first, the camera’s position is virtually at the level of the water’s surface and incorporates – to arresting effect – a shimmering aqua haze into its viewpoint. Once the boy’s legs are in the pool, the camera moves underwater in order to make the most of that image. Here too, the fancy composition tells us nothing more than that RaMell Ross knows how to use a camera ingeniously.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a description of contemporary life in the title location in Alabama, was much admired for its visual complexity and avant-garde form. Ross’s stated approach – ‘to centralize my new community in documentary’s language of truth’, ‘to participate not capture; shoot from not at’ (Wikipedia again) – may have worked well in a non-linear piece but The Nickel Boys is a very different undertaking. Nickel Academy, where Colson Whitehead’s action is principally set, is based on the notorious Dozier School, a Florida reformatory that operated for more than a century and was eventually revealed to be the site of appalling criminal abuse of boys in the school, who were beaten, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. Legal investigations into Dozier led to its closure as recently as 2011. Whitehead’s narrative moves between the 1960s, when his two protagonists – Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner – are Nickel boys, and the 2010s, when one of them is a businessman in New York City and is forced, through the public scandal that Nickel Academy has now become, to reckon with his own past in the school and who he became once he escaped from it.
Whitehead’s set-up sounds straightforward enough and Ross’s version of it does include a few relatively conventional elements. He uses news film to set the political scene and clarify the story’s timeframe: from the Selma-Montgomery marches of 1965 to Martin Luther King’s funeral in April 1968 and the Apollo 8 moonshot over Christmas in the same year; when Elwood’s grandmother visits Nickel she mentions that Lyndon Johnson is moving forward with the Civil Rights legislation initiated by the Kennedy administration. The Nickel boys aren’t all African-Americans but in Jim Crow Florida the students are racially segregated and the focus is understandably on the Black majority, who are much worse treated than their white counterparts. Except that Ross’s fragmentary, elliptical style doesn’t generate real dramatic focus on anyone. The rationed illustrations of abuse may be a relief for the viewer but they’re a form of soft-pedalling too. Ross foregrounds the school’s manicured green lawns and stints on its grimmer aspects to create a picture of Nickel that may owe something to Jonathan Glazer’s portrait of domestic life over the wall from Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest (2023). But Ross’s elaborate montages get in the way of any such picture emerging. Whenever he does settle into more extended scenes these stand out as incongruously protracted.
The grandmother’s monologue on her visit to Nickel is virtually uninterrupted: she proceeds from the good news about LBJ to the bad news that the lawyer she paid to arrange an appeal against Elwood’s incarceration has made off with her cash and disappeared without trace. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor makes a fine job of this big speech but it’s obviously going to be the one chance she’ll get to make an impression. At the school’s annual interracial boxing event, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), a malign white administrator, instructs a Black kid (Bryant Tardy) to take a dive against his white opponent; the boy either refuses or forgets to do as he’s told, and wins the bout. (That’s the last seen of the Black boy, who presumably ended up in one of the many unmarked graves discovered years later in the school grounds.) This boxing match – including the reactions of Spencer et al watching ringside – seems to go on forever.
Elwood (Ethan Herisse) should never have been in Nickel in the first place. A promising high-school student in Tallahassee, whose teacher (Jimmie Fails) encourages independent thinking, Elwood wins a scholarship to a college for African-American students. On the way there, he hitches a lift from a man driving a stolen car; when the driver is arrested, Elwood is pulled in as his accomplice and, since he’s a minor, ends up in Nickel. By highlighting the plight of someone entirely innocent, Whitehead runs the risk of suggesting the place wasn’t so terrible for boys who’d actually committed petty crimes. But the friendship between Elwood and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who represent contrasting outlooks, makes good sense. Elwood is an ardent admirer of Martin Luther King and fervent supporter of the Civil Rights movement; Turner is more worldly wise and sceptical about Black lives getting better, inside or outside Nickel Academy.
The place erodes Elwood’s optimism but he compiles an exposé of what’s going on there, which Turner reluctantly passes to a visiting government inspector. As a result, Elwood gets put in the school sweat box and Turner gets wind of the authorities’ plans to murder his friend. The two boys escape together. To the bitter end, it’s Elwood who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time: the boys haven’t got far on their stolen bikes before their armed pursuers shoot Elwood dead. Turner gets away, though, and travels north. The NYC businessman (Daveed Diggs) of the early 2000s, anxiously following latest developments in the uncovering of Nickel’s atrocious past, is the middle-aged Turner but his name now, and the values he has tried to espouse in adult life, are inherited from his late friend. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson give truly felt performances but they’re always fighting a losing battle for attention with RaMell Ross’s nearly relentless image-making.
On a couple of occasions, Ross puts on the screen clips from Stanley Kramer’s 1958 The Defiant Ones (1958), a black-and-white drama in more ways than one. Two escaped convicts, played by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, are chained together and have to co-operate in order to stay on the run. (By coincidence, I’m due to see The Defiant Ones – for the first time – in BFI’s Poitier season later this month.) It’s hard to tell whether or not Ross’s use of these excerpts is meant to be ironic – or if’s there any significance in the fact that, when it’s showing on Turner-Elwood’s TV, he doesn’t appear to be watching. Like so much else in Nickel Boys, the Kramer movie clips are part of an artful, uncommunicative design.
9 January 2025
