Split Decision: "Nickel Boys"
Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 4:00PM In the Split Decision series, two of our writers face off on an Oscar-nominated movie one loves and the other doesn't. Today, Nick Taylor and Nathaniel R discuss Nickel Boys...
NICK: Hello Nathaniel! Hope you’re doing well on this fine day. We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re . . . . I can’t think of another rhyme. What I can think of is Nickel Boys, and how blindsided I was to see it show up in this year’s Best Picture lineup after only showing up in Adapted Screenplay.
I’m happy for the film and RaMell Ross but also confused, and a little annoyed it didn’t make a bigger showing. It’s one of my favorites from this year’s Oscar nominees, and though I get the divisiveness around its first-person POV and how the film actually uses it, I’m a very big fan of what Nickel Boys achieves. That’s been the biggest point of discussion around the film, so maybe it’s best to dive in there? I’m not sure I actually know what you think of Nickel Boys, so lemme hand you the mic.
NATHANIEL: It's funny how personal feelings are often distracting static when it comes to Oscar expectations, whether you're on the pro or the con side of any given film. I wasn't the least bit surprised about Nickel Boys crashing Oscar's biggest category after all the breathless raves and its solid if unspectacular showing in the precursors. I'm Still Here was the only Picture nomination that threw me. Sadly, trust me I didn't want to feel this way, Nickel Boys is my least favourite of the nominated ten...
I feel defensive about this. Who wants to be on the 'con' side of an artful film with such good intentions based on hugely acclaimed material that also fills the unreliable but intermittent 'challenging arthouse film' slot at the Oscars? Not I! Generally when something challenging crashes Oscar's most coveted category it's exciting and worthy of celebration. This time, I'm on the outside looking in at the party.
And that's my primary issue with the film itself. That POV feels like such an exercize that I was never not aware that I was watching Challenging Important Cinema. As a result I was never immersed. I always admire gutsy bets from auteurs but they're always a gamble in terms of whether you hit the jackpot. My favourite feeling at the movies is getting totally lost in the experience to the point that when you emerge the world briefly looks different, your eyes adjusting back to reality. The Zone of Interest, just last year, was a similar kind of gauntlet thrown down at the viewer but in that case the experiment worked. I admit that it didn't help me that I saw Nickel Boys from a couch. Dark movie theaters are ALWAYS the best way to feel immersed (provided you're not surrounded by heathens checking their glowing phones -- WHY DID YOU SPEND MONEY ON A TICKET?!?) . I found the POV direction and cinematography incredibly alienating. It wasn't just emotionally alienating but narratively self-defeating, too. I sometimes (not always of course) couldn't grasp what was going on other than that it was horrific. Who even is the protagonist? By the end of the movie this man still felt like a stranger. How can I be invested in the excavation of someone's past if I don't know whose past it is or what actually happened?
NICK: I had some of these quibbles with Nickel Boys. More than once we get a shot or edit that doesn’t quite make sense for anyone’s POV, and I’m curious to know what other strategies Ross and Jomo Fray considered for shooting Daveed Diggs’s character. It's the kind of ambitious gesture I’d probably appreciate on principle even if I didn't like it, but I really am struck by the emotional, intellectual, and cinematic claims this stakes on the audience and on this specific text. Maybe part of it was my own expectations for the project, some kind of series of artfully choreographed long-take sequences without much editing. But I was stunned by the dexterity of Fray's camera with depth of field, mobility, natural lighting, and semi-surreal flourishes like the hissing gator and actors repeating dialogue at each other as if the first try was rebooted away.
Nicholas Monsour's editing might be just as essential to my experience of the film. He balances a lot of sustained shots with almost ephemeral images, like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor throwing that crisp white bedsheet over Elwood. The historical footage doesn't exactly alleviate the sense of Nickel Boys being an intellectual exercise, but it's still incorporated in smooth, thoughtful ways. There's a lot of craft in the editing and sound mixing to prevent the cinematography from turning Nickel Boys into a hermetically sealed chamber piece.
I see what you mean about Elwood being such a distant figure, but given how many literary adaptations die on the vine trying to figure out how to make their observant protagonist remotely interesting, I was happy to try and learn about him and Turner through what the camera asserted about their personalities. Where are they looking, who are they showing deference to or interest in. The sheer beauty and attention given to Ellis-Taylor says a lot about how both characters regard her.
You said it was your least favorite of this year’s Best Picture nominees, but did any elements of it grab you?
NATHANIEL: The cinematography certainly is dexterous, ambidextrous even. But to what end? I have similar troubles with Pablo Larraín's Maria. It's hard to fault the beauty coming from an enormity of talent within the crew, but if the end result doesn't hold you emotionally, or entertain you, or inform you on some level whether sociologically, intellectually, or thematically... than it's a bit like painting a masterpiece for a collector who locks it in a private vault, never to be seen again. I don't want to be uncharitable towards Ramell Ross and Jomo Fray's work because they're both clearly gifted. But the truth is I found the beauty of the filmmaking in conflict with the subject. I am not sure I should be thinking of beautiful golden light, or evocative depth of field, or provocative directorial choices when whatever hell is happening (again I wasn't always sure) is happening. I shouldn't keep bringing up other movies, I know, but I saw this in close proximity to Civil War. I don't think that's a great movie per se but it deploys something similar in aesthetic friction. It's doing different presentational things with the filmmaking and it's utterly gorgeous to look at while what's unfolding in the narrative is horrific. This dichotomy between beautiful imagery and the ugliness of inhumanity doesn't work for me at all in Nickel Boys but I thought it was a strength of Civil War, it's almost like it's saying "look at how beautiful this country could be... but we're just throwing it all away."
So I guess I'm saying form and function not form vs function. Is that what I'm saying? I don't know. Films shouldn't have to be this much work. I like them to be some work, mind you (don't feed me everything!) but not this much unless they're very satisfying in another way.
ANYWAY what did I like about it? Sorry it took me so long to get to your question. I just loved Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor's performance. The POV lensing was alienating for me but it did, just as you suggest, come alive when it came to nana Hattie. The camera (i.e. Elwood and Turner) loves her. She radiates so much humanity and compassion. What impressed me even more was her subtle sussing out of her scene partner's whole mood in that moment, whatever the moment is; I can't imagine that's easy when your scene partner is essentially a camera rather than a fellow actor.
I also really dug the shift in POV from Elwood to Turner at one point, even if I didn't quite understand why it was happening at that particular juncture. Maybe it would have been more fascinating or fulfilling had this happened more frequently between more than just these two? Like a mosaic of systemic troubles and feelings and individual histories (which I actually think the film aspires to on some level) rather than just Elwood's traumatic predicament. The shift to Turner came as a relief. I was finally able to see the protagonist even if it took a full hour to meet him.
NICK: Nothing wrong with comparing Nickel Boys to other movies! Especially to two films throwing a lot at the wall to mixed effect. Your examples have really helped me understand why the movie didn’t work for you, and, in turn, why the experiments here are so much more successful for me than the ones going on in Maria and Civil War. I see your point about the beauty being a possible distraction rather than an asset - I’ve had that same quibble with other films, to include Maria's grab-bag of tints and pallettes. In this instance, however, of attempting to depict Black American history in a way that doesn't deny moments of joy for the sake of foregrounding abject tragedy, I see the beauty as a political claim as much as a formal and aesthetic one. This felt like a meeting of form and function in a way I haven't encountered before. I don't want every film to try following this specific road, but as with Ross's Hale County This Morning, This Evening, the sheer adventurousness of this mosaic against all forms of cinematic convention is jaw-dropping. Did I crave a shot of two characters talking to each other? Sure, but that's hard enough to find these days even in more basic films.
I’m 100% with you on Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. She’s just radiant, and for my money she’s even more spectacular this year in a family drama called Exhibiting Forgiveness, as a loving, damaged woman trying to hold her family together without reckoning with the past that kept them apart. The whole cast is stellar - forgive me for sidetracking our post, but I haven’t had a lot of chances to recommend that one to people. It’s definitely a more traditional acting showcase than Nickel Boys, though I’m impressed with how much personality some of these folks convey from within this very unintuitive setup. Brandon Wilson, Craig Tate, Graylent Bryan Banks, all convey tangible interiority in their scenes, whether they’re in the center of the frame or ghosting on the edges of the camera.
Also, if it's your least favorite of the Picture nominees, how would you rank it amongst its fellow Adapted Screenplay nominees? I've admittedly taken the structure for granted in the wake of all its audiovisual experiments, and the occasional haziness about what exactly is going on at points feels like a script issue as much as a casualty of high style. Frankly, it's easy for me to see this nomination as a way to recognize Ross even if he can't muscle his way into a crowded Best Director lineup, but to steal a phrase from you Nathaniel, the mosaic of systemic troubles and individual feelings is borne out of these scene-level interactions and stagings. Trying to hang a script together from this conceit does not sound easy at all, and Nickel Boys still preserves the voice and ingenuity of Colson Whitehead's novel while taking plenty of its own risks. I'm not sure how I'd vote between this and Sing Sing, but those are my favorite nominees in this category by far.
NATHANIEL: At the risk of sounding like a heathen I prefer Sing Sing, easily, for the simple fact that I enjoyed it / was moved by it more. I could always follow both what it wanted to say and the specificity of its path to say that. What's more degree of difficulty can only take you so far in a contest of who 'should' win. I hear your point about the challenge presented but I don't think any of the Adapted Screenplay nominees present an easy path from page to screen (for disparate reasons) apart from Conclave since mainstream novels are often fairly cinematic in their original form. It's funny, I'm always arguing against people voting on individual categories based on their general feelings about a film but I'm the first to admit that it is not always easy to do. It's just that you should do it.
All that said, Adapted Screenplay is far more subjective than other already subjective categories. Can you really judge the screenplays without having read all the originating text or are you meant to judge them in the same way you might judge an original screenplay (with the added caveat that you know that it didn't spring into existence from imagination alone.) To complicaate matters even further unless you're a completist sometimes you've read some of the source material and not others so how exactly are you judging it? To me this an Editing are the categories that are hardest to judge fairly because you often don't know what the artisan was working with from a starting point.
Since you like the film so much I'm wondering what you make of the 'present' scenes where Daveed Diggs takes over one of the roles and is piecing together his traumatic past? Even if the film impressed you early on didn't it deflate in these sequences? These sequences are when I definitely shut the book on coming around to the movie. As much as I was put off by the POV filmmaking in the bulk of the movie, this made even less sense to me, as a conceit / technique, in the now. If the whole journey has been an excavation of Elwood and Turner's traumatic adolescence via modern discoveries and deserved condemnations, why are we still inside his head. Shouldn't we have finally escaped this rigid way of seeing in order to contextualize what we've seen just as je himself finally has evidence to support his memories and contextualize them as a shared experience?
NICK: Sing Sing is my other favorite Adapted Screenplay nominee, so no shade here. We love a sturdily well-made crowdpleaser that pays off on its major character arcs and thematic arguments. The way it circumvents so many tropes around prison masculinity in favor of commemorating the community, artistry, and humanity those men have fostered is really special. Plus it gives great scaffolding for those incredible performances.
I'm not uninterested in seeing the Daveed Diggs material interpolated differently into Nickel Boys - either in a different shooting style than the fixed-camera, back-of-the-head rigidity, or maybe a version without the chronological back-and-forth. It certainly interrupts the vibe of the main plot without quite demanding as much from the viewer, though it does introduce ideas about how kids who survived horrible trauma might become adults, functional or not, and the tactics they use to get through the day. The very literary conceit of who Diggs is actually playing is easier to hide in plain sight on the page than on film, where we could see how his complexion resembles Turner way more than Elwood.
Still, I take this device as emphasizing the different ways the adult Turner is going through his adulthood as an out-of-body experience borne out of denying his identity, his past - all the pain he's experienced and cynically believed would never be acknowledged. The payoff of Turner admitting who he is to his girlfriend really affected me, and I'll gladly accept a risky if uneven device if it sticks the landing. And as I send you this email, the WGA has just announced Nickel Boys as its Adapted Screenplay winner! So yay for RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes.
It's been great talking about this film with you!
NATHANIEL: Thank you for articulating why you loved Nickel Boys and your passion for RaMell Ross' and Jomo Fray's vision. I hope to love their next feature (together or separately) while also refusing to drink the Koolaid that they reinvented cinema. Some of the most feverish acclaim for the movie seems to believe that they invented POV lensing wholesale but it's been with us a long time so this irks me to no end. I don't know who first thought of it but the earliest usage I can think of is that queasy single sequence jolt in Hitchcock's penultimate thriller Frenzy (1972) through the eyes of the killer. You can feel echoes off this in the sick voyeurism of Bigelow's Strange Days (1995)... and probably some slasher movies, too, I don't know.
I only know of two films that have tried it for a full feature though knowing there are two without giving it much thought at all leads me to believe there are more before Ross attempted it. The most mainstream I know of is the action film Hardcore Henry (2015).Needless to say Henry did not receive the awards love that have greeted Elwood and Turner... unless you count the People's Choice Midnight Madness at TIFF.
I know I've been a curmudgeon in this exchange (the nature of the beast with this series for one half of the duet) so I want to end on a positive note: If anyone reading loved the artfully executed first person POV challenge thrown down in Nickel Boys, I urge you to check out Aleksandr Sokurov's highly acclaimed Russian Ark, which was an arthouse hit in 2002. It's an incredible movie that features heady material (Russian history and art) and a double gimmick (first person POV throughout and all of it in a single continuous shot). Whenever you're asking a lot of audiences with cinematic experimentation, you should reward them like Sokurov does, wrapping up with artful pageantry after a tight running time (99 minutes!).
Previous Split Decisions
- A COMPLETE UNKNOWN with Eric Blume and Ben Miller
- EMILIA PÉREZ with Lynn Lee, Nick Taylor, and Juan Carlos Ojano
- NOSFERATU, with Cláudio Alves & Nick Taylor
- A REAL PAIN, with Eric Blume & Cláudio Alves
- ANORA, with Abe Friedtanzer & Juan Carlos Ojano
- DUNE: PART TWO with Cláudio Alves & Lynn Lee
- THE BRUTALIST with Nick Taylor & Abe Friedtanzer
Reader Comments (7)
"We're Here We're Queer Get Used To It" so said the gays of Madonna's Blond Ambition tour,still one of the greatest music documentaries,just saying.
Haven't seen the film but welcome the discussion,seeing it next week.
Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1947) is supposedly one of the inspirations for the first-person POV of Nickel Boys. The earlier film was not considered a success, but I think the acting is the real problem there, not the camera.
Frank Zappa -- DARK PASSAGE, produced and released very closely to the Montgomery film, was also shot as a POV noir. Nick Taylor wrote about Agnes Moorehead's performance in that film a few years ago. Let me share the write-up's URL...
http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/5/21/1947-agnes-moorehead-in-dark-passage-and-the-lost-moment.html
@ Cláudio
I remember that write-up—and the film (I'm a sucker for a classic Agnes Moorehead performance).
It's supposed to be alienating, both to mirror Elwood's own sense of alienation from the world and to get you to reflect on how we typically experience Black stories and subjectivities in media representation. Immersion is not the point at all.
I thought the 1st person POV worked in this, but largely because of the switching between the two boys.
RE: Daveed Diggs' character, I half convinced myself that the reason we're seeing the back of his head is that we're taking on the perspective of the ghost of his friend.
I'm with Nathaniel on this one: while I can respect that the film is doing something different, well... call me old-fashioned, but I have a hard time following and connecting to a main character when I can't see him for the first forty minutes of the film. It's incredibly alienating...
I will say the screenplay is really good (I can see a version of this same script shot without the POV and have it work wonders), and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is amazing in it...