Telluride: ‘Nickel Boys,’ Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Book, Will Challenge Oscar Voters

Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ big screen interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Nickel Boys, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival‘s Herzog Theatre on Friday night. Reactions among attendees, including numerous Academy members, have been strongly divided — many were impressed and deeply moved by the film, while others were left cold by it — leaving its Oscar prospects somewhat up in the air.

Ross is a tremendously gifted filmmaker who was Oscar-nominated and won a Peabody Award for his unconventional 2018 documentary feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which looked at the Black experience in a part of Alabama. Now just 42, he is making his narrative directorial debut with Nickel Boys, the script of which he co-wrote with his Hale County producer Joslyn Barnes.

The story centers on two young Black men, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who, in the 1960s, while the fight for civil rights is being waged in much of America, wind up together at the Nickel Academy. This Florida reform school (based on a real establishment) treats its young charges — especially the non-white ones — barbarically, like prisoners and slaves, making every effort to dehumanize them, and in some cases even killing them. Turner has been there before, gone back out into the world, and then been sent back; but Elwood, as punishment for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is a first-timer. When they meet, they are each influenced by the differing perspective of the other — and the perspective of the film itself changes.

Nickel Boys is visually beautiful, but very avant-garde, not unlike the films of Terrence Malick — which critics have eaten up for decades, but the public has largely avoided and the Academy has embraced only occasionally and to a limited extent. It will be interesting to see the degree to which Oscar voters will respond to Ross’s film.

Cinematographers may well embrace Jomo Fray’s lensing — he artfully lingers on various objects, goes in and out of focus and, most strikingly, shoots from the point of view of a disembodied protagonist (as was done in 1947’s Lady in the Lake). But others are left cold by being deprived of the chance to see, facially, how a protagonist is reacting to events occurring around him.

Editors may applaud the way that film editor Nicholas Monsour splices montages of footage of assorted things into the larger story. But for others, the relevance of that footage to the larger story isn’t always clear, and it makes a film that is quite long (two hours and 20 minutes) and challenging (it is relentlessly, heartbreakingly sad) feel even longer.

Finally, while the young male actors have the most screen time and do fine work, the performance to which voters may respond most of all is that of the always wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (When They See Us, King Richard and Origin), who makes the most of every moment as Elwood’s grandmother, particularly in a scene in which she tries to visit Elwood at Nickel.

Nickel Boys, the producers of which include Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner (Moonlight), will open the New York Film Festival on Sept. 27, go into limited theatrical release on Oct. 25, and then begin streaming on Amazon.