• Sun. Feb 9th, 2025

Movie Curiosities

The online diary of an aspiring movie nerd

In recent years, there’s been some controversy over the matter of film length. In general, the mainstream attitude still tends to prefer shorter runtimes, as they’re less costly to produce, less taxing on the audience, and easier for theaters to screen more runtimes during the day which in turn leads to greater box office revenue. There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions — The Brutalist, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Irishman are all recent examples of movies that got heavily criticized for their runtimes in surplus of three hours. Which seems rather odd, considering how nobody seems to mind the Avatar films and some MCU flicks running near or over three hours.

But on reflection, there might be a simple explanation: As a general rule, people don’t mind something going on for extended periods of time if they’re having fun. The Avatar movies are fun. Superhero movies are fun. Scorsese movies and The Brutalist are not fun. And neither is Nickel Boys, which clocks in at 140 minutes and still feels an hour longer.

Nickel Boys, based on the Colson Whitehead novel from 2019, is a fictional story loosely inspired by the Dozier School for Boys. Open from 1900 up until it finally closed in 2011, Dozier used to be the largest juvenile detention facility in the USA, and of course it had a nasty reputation for horrifically abusive treatment toward black kids. In fact, the movie repurposes actual news footage about Dozier, pertaining to the discovery of unmarked graves and the corpses of young children buried on school grounds. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The film adaptation comes to us from director/co-writer RaMell Ross, alongside co-writer Joslyn Barnes, both of whom are primarily known in certain film circles as documentary filmmakers. The film’s central gimmick is that it was shot entirely in first-person POV, but that’s pretty loose. There’s some non-chronological storytelling in here, some montages of relevant scenes, some archival footage, a few moments that our POV characters couldn’t have been there for, and a few scenes with the back of the character’s head taking up half the screen. Not to mention all the extreme close-up shots that couldn’t possibly have been a POV shot unless the character’s forehead was literally touching whatever was in the frame.

Our first protagonist is Elwood Curtis (Ethan Cole Sharp), a black teenager growing up in 1962 Tallahassee. Long story short, he gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, gets convicted on some trumped-up charge or other, and is thus imprisoned at the Nickel Academy (there’s our Dozier stand-in). This is where he meets our other protagonist (Turner, played by Brandon Wilson), who’s already been locked up at Nickel for however much time. Elwood and Turner befriend each other, and so the camera alternates between their two viewpoints as the film unfolds.

In other words, we are literally seeing America — mostly early-1960s America — through the eyes of an African-American kid. It’s a neat idea, expertly delivered with phenomenal production design. And of course the documentary filmmakers have a keen eye for detail and authenticity, that’s certainly a factor.

The unfortunate downside is that the characters spend most of the running time in a prison. Where the staff openly commit unspeakable acts of cruelty and torture, even outright murder against children of color. And we’re locked inside the heads of those same children for two solid hours.

It’s a rough one to watch, is what I’m saying.

To be sure, the film has a lot to say about systemic racism. Hell, one character comes right out and says that Nickel is nothing but the rest of society without the pretense. And it’s tough to argue that we’ve come so much farther in 60 years, given the disproportionately black population of our overcrowded prisons, the 13th Amendment loophole that allows prisoners (again, most of whom are black people) to be exploited for slave labor, the financial costs and bureaucratic loopholes that prevent our poorest citizens from getting a fair trial, and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, the film makes the bold choice of interspersing flash-forward scenes to let us know in advance that Nickel does eventually get shut down. The horrific torture and abuse of prisoners is brought to light, unmarked graves are discovered, and lawsuits are filed to try and bring some manner of reparation to the survivors and their families. Not that it’s much of any comfort to the children who remain brutally and prematurely murdered. And there’s nothing to be done about the administrators who all died peacefully before they could ever be brought to justice. And the courts could never award enough money to make up for the barbaric loss of so many lives, if the courts award anything at all.

But at least Nickel eventually got shut down and everyone who suffered through it got their vindication. Is that really worth anything, in a time when systemic racism and the BIPOC people are still locked up and exploited for slave labor in disproportionate numbers? I won’t pretend I have the answer to that question, and I’m not sure the film does either.

As for our two protagonists, Turner has more or less resigned himself and others to the fact that the system is rigged, so he’s devoted his time and effort into finding ways of staying alive and making the best of it. (Like going out on “community service” labor runs to get off the academy grounds and make money selling excess goods, for instance.) Compare that to Elwood, who studied hard in the interest of black liberation, a young kid trying to bide his time until he can find a way to dismantle Nickel completely.

So, one’s a coward and one’s an optimist. The movie doesn’t end well for one of them, and I won’t say which. Though there is an argument to be made that the movie doesn’t end well for either one.

I’m not really sure what else there is to say about Nickel Boys, because the film speaks pretty damn loudly for itself. As with so many other movies crafted by documentary filmmakers (Concussion is still my go-to example), the film is aggressively blunt in making a statement, rather than telling a story. It’s two and a half hours of the filmmakers all but outright telling us what we should be thinking and feeling, rather than conveying the message through a compelling narrative.

And it’s not like this is the first movie (nor will it be the last) to talk about racial trauma in the 1960s South — you already know what this movie’s all about. The only real novelty here is in the POV presentation, but the non-chronological plot, the occasional stylistic flourishes (especially in the denouement) and the constant switching back and forth between viewpoints is a lot to keep track of.

This is unfortunately another case of an overly long and deathly self-important movie that outright demands to be taken seriously by critics and awards voters, without much regard for anyone else. That’s not to say it isn’t an intelligent or poorly made film, but gods above, what a drag to sit through. Seriously, if these filmmakers wanted to make a documentary about Dozier, they should’ve just made a documentary about Dozier.

Ultimately, this is another one of those movies that I respect far more than I like. A movie that I’m glad I saw once and only once. If you can clear the high bar for entry with this one, I can recommend a home video viewing.

By Curiosity Inc.

I hold a B.S. in Bioinformatics, the only one from Pacific University's Class of '09. I was the stage-hand-in-chief of my high school drama department and I'm a bass drummer for the Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers. I dabble in video games and I'm still pretty good at DDR. My primary hobby is going online for upcoming movie news. I am a movie buff, a movie nerd, whatever you want to call it. Comic books are another hobby, but I'm not talking about Superman or Spider-Man or those books that number in the triple-digits. I'm talking about Watchmen, Preacher, Sandman, etc. Self-contained, dramatic, intellectual stories that couldn't be accomplished in any other medium. I'm a proud son of Oregon, born and raised here. I've been just about everywhere in North and Central America and I love it right here.

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