The Nickel Boys (2024)

The book is brutal to read and I kind of dreaded watching the movie because of the intense brutality of it, literally killing black children sadistically and repeatedly, and I just wasn't sure how I could watch it unfold in living color. I was right to brace myself for the impact, it wasn't what I was expecting either. I did not know this when I watched it, but the director's previous feature was the Oscar-nominated 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. As documentaries go, it was a lightning-strike cinematic discovery. With a certain kind of fragmented, intimate lyricism, it immersed the viewer in the details of Black life in a small Alabama town, gradually centering on a few years in the lives of two teens. It was impactful, truthful, and horrible without being overly gruesome. This one is quite different, but has some sameness as well. The stories of two Black teens confined to a brutal Florida reform school, is told from the point of view of his protagonists (which I learned from a reviewer that this is called the subjective camera, and people almost uniformly dislike it, so it is risky, but I thought it was successful in conveying the pain as well as engendering sympathy). Whitehead’s novel is sad and infuriating. It starts off as the story of Elwood Curtis, a precocious introvert growing up in a rural town in the Jim Crow–era South. He winds up at Nickel Academy after he hitches a ride with the wrong man on what would have been his first day taking classes at a nearby college. He meets the laid-back cynic Turner, a Houston native who’s on his second stint at Nickel and has few illusions about anyone’s chances of getting out of this nightmare through official means. The filme slips back and forth between their time at Nickel and the present day, and between the optimistic Elwood and the realistic Turner--the so-called reform school was modeled after the real-life Dozier School for Boys, a monstrously abusive institution from whose grounds nearly a hundred burials have been discovered in recent years, and for me, knowing the real life ending for so many who were there makes it all the more horrible to watch unfold, but this story is beautifully told in this film.