RaMell Ross films Colson Whitehead’s novel about a Florida reform school entirely through the eyes of its two boys, and the gamble mostly pays. It is tender where it could have been brutal, exactly made, long, and a little in love with its own method.
Elwood is a serious boy in Tallahassee, raised by his grandmother Hattie, who plays a Martin Luther King record until he knows it by heart. A teacher, Mr Hill, gets him a place in college classes across town. On the way there he takes a lift in a car that turns out to be stolen, and the state of Florida sends him to Nickel Academy, a reform school where the Black boys are worked, beaten and occasionally not seen again. RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes have adapted Colson Whitehead’s novel, and their one big decision is that we watch it from behind Elwood’s eyes, and later from behind those of Turner, the friend he makes inside. Our verdict is that the gamble comes off more often than not, and when it does the film is as close as we have come to sitting inside someone else’s memory. It is also 140 minutes long and rather pleased with itself.
Jomo Fray keeps the camera at the height of a teenager’s head. When Elwood looks down we see his hands, his shoes, an orange being peeled; when someone speaks to him they speak straight into the lens from a foot away, and we cannot look anywhere else. Early on, Hattie comes towards us across a room for a hug, and the screen fills with the shoulder of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s dress and goes dark. We were caught off guard by how much that undid us. Ross has found a way to give an audience something cinema has never managed, which is being held.
The performances have to work without faces for long stretches, and mostly they do. Ethan Herisse plays Elwood as a voice and a way of standing: careful, upright, still sure the rules will protect him if he follows them. Brandon Wilson’s Turner knows better, and when the film first switches to his eyes we see Elwood properly for the first time, across a canteen table, and are startled at how young he is. Ellis-Taylor has one long scene of talking to a boy who is not answering, and it is the best acting in the film. Hamish Linklater’s Spencer, who runs the place, never raises his voice, which is worse.
Nicholas Monsour cuts in things Elwood could not have seen: rocket launches, an alligator, an old Hollywood film playing on a shop-window television that reflects the boy watching it. It ought to be pretentious and mostly is not; these are the pictures a mind keeps alongside its own. Alex Somers and Scott Alario score it with hums and held notes that sit under the Florida heat. Nora Mendis builds Nickel as low white buildings and a lawn, with one shed the boys call the White House and do not go near. Brittany Loar’s work shirts are slightly too big, as institutional clothes are.
The method has costs. Whenever a character explains something to the lens, the film tips into the manner of an interview, and we became aware of an actor being asked to hold a look longer than a person would. The middle hour circles: work detail, dormitory, a boxing match, work detail. And because the camera is always one boy or the other, Herisse and Wilson are almost never in a frame together, so the friendship the film rests on has to be taken partly on trust.
Ross’s previous film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), was a documentary that watched Black lives in Alabama with the same patience and the same refusal to point at the obvious thing. This is that eye given a story to tell. The reviews so far are close to unanimous and several have reached for the largest words available. We stop a little short of them. It is an unusually good film with a method it trusts slightly more than we do.
See it in a cinema; at home the frame shrinks and the trick of being someone else shrinks with it. The 12A is honest. The violence happens off screen or behind a door, which is how Elwood experiences it and how the film insists we do too. Take someone whose hand you would not mind holding.
