The Nickel Boys & Seeing

Happy new year, friends! If you managed to take a break over the holidays then I hope it was a good one, ideally full of delicious food and good television. Highlights for me included the return of Feathers McGraw in Murder Most Fowl and the final episodes of The Mirror and the Light. I never knew beekeeping could be so emotional. Mark Rylance, my friends and I decided on New Year’s Eve, is most definitely in.

This weekend I’ve gone a little more highbrow than Wallace and Gromit with RaMell Ross’s extraordinary adaptation of The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead is fast becoming one of my favourite novelists, and The Nickel Boys among my favourite of his books that he’s written. The Nickel Boys is set in a segregated reform school in the Jim Crow South, in 1960s Florida. It’s the story of two young Black boys become friends when they meet at Nickel Academy: Elwood, buoyed by optimism, the love of his grandma and the civil rights movement in full flow, and Turner, whose years in and out of institutions like Nickel have hardened him into cynicism and self-preservation. The boys’ friendship is a tender and joyous thing in among a place of horrors. Nickel, which Whitehead began writing about after learning of the 81 unmarked graves discovered in the grounds of a segregated reform school in Florida in 2014, is a brutal and terrifying place, where boys who misstep will be beaten, sent to the sweat box, or taken “out back” and never seen again.

There is so much warmth in Colson Whitehead’s writing, his characterisations so full and so vivid that the violence that often appears in his novels doesn’t ever feel gratuitous. The novel’s heart is not the brutality of Nickel but the relationship between Elwood and Turner, who Whitehead has described as “the two sides of his personality” — optimism that injustices will end, cynicism that things will continue to be the way they always have been. It’s a story whose violence would be easy to sensationalise, translated into film, given how quickly the moral imperative to bear witness turns to spectacle whenever a screen is involved.

But The Nickel Boys is unlike any adaptation I have seen. It’s filmed entirely in the first-person perspective of Elwood and Turner. We see everything through their eyes, and so much of the story is told in fragments: a hand trailing oranges on a Florida afternoon, the landscape and light shifting through the open doorway of a railway wagon, Elwood’s grandmother cutting cake over a white tablecloth while she reassures him, “not my Elwood.” During the more violent scenes, the boys’ vision often becomes blurry, overlaid with archive photography, with clips from Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones and films from the Florida Memory Project. In these scenes, we are no longer looking at the pain but through it.

The effect is extraordinary. The film feels at once so much realer to life — we do not, after all, experience life looking at ourselves from the outside, the star of a movie, but through our eyes, our ears, our skin — and so much more extraordinary than life for its realism. When the boys are nervous or bored or ashamed they look down, the camera looks down, looks up on command, sound coming in snatches. When the boys are frightened, or overwhelmed, or embraced, the scene closes in, and senses fold in: colours, sounds, texture. The more comfortable the boys become with each other, the more we see of their faces, their smiles, their bond. From all this texture, the narrative emerges effortlessly, and the novel’s brutal final twist emerges here, too, out of this play of perspective that has by now drawn you entirely out of yourself and into the story.

The film is no doubt harrowing as much as it is beautiful, but it is also tender, even humorous at times. And you feel all of it. It is this, more than anything, that I love about storytelling — it has the capacity to close up the space between you and a person whose experiences are entirely alien to you. I left 2024 feeling worried about the state of storytelling, about my own profession and what it might mean to live in a society that doesn’t value this experience of transportation, of sympathetic identification. But seeing this film, I was reminded that, when it comes to storytelling, even though we might be telling the same stories, there are always new ways of telling them, and there are always new ways of seeing each other and the world. There are always new marvels. This is not of course a cheerful film, though there is more than plenty of beauty in it, but somehow, it left me feeling more Elwood than Turner, more hopeful than not. That, for me, is a good enough start to 2025.

With love, Rosie xxx