The idea of praising a film for being beautiful is understandably suspect. It’s the kind of gushing tribute paid to things that turn out to be lifeless and humourless. But RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated film Nickel Boys, adapted from the novel by Colson Whitehead, really is beautiful; it creates beauty and even a kind of complex, defiant joy from generational pain and trauma caused by racism in the postwar United States. Of all the films on this mixed best picture nomination list, Nickel Boys – produced by Dede Gardner, Joslyn Barnes and Jeremy Kleiner– is the film which I’d most like to win, perhaps partly because as a film about the African American experience it for some reason isn’t in the conversation in the way Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight once was.
Gorgeously shot by Jomo Fray and designed by Nora Mendis, the film follows the fortunes of Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse, a smart young black boy in 1960s Tallahassee, Florida, who gets thrown into a brutal reform school called The Nickel Academy (based on the notorious real-life Dozier School). This is a racist tyranny where the black kids are beaten and often killed, in which case they are secretly buried and officially described as “runaways” – and all because Elwood innocently hitched a ride in a stolen car on his way to a technical academy for which he had been recommended on account of his academic promise. A nauseous irony re-routes him to a different institution.
