nickel boys

I went into Nickel Boys with a hazy recollection of Colson Whitehead's novel and with the knowledge that RaMell Ross's film took an unusual approach of relaying its story through first person point of view shots. I had also previously seen Ross's exquisite nonficiton film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a sensory experience as much as any film can offer. As someone who grew up in the rural American south, I've seen few movies that capture the landscape and feelings of it so vividly. Besides Hale County, a few come to mind: Phil Morrison's Junebug and Chantal Akerman's South. Films about the south often paint things with broad strokes (and with broad, unconvincing accents), or tend to simplify racial injustices. Ross's two films are the antithesis of broad and simplistic. Nickel Boys is both so intimate, specific, prickly and expansive, that it feels like your bobbing along, riding a single wave, and then suddenly, experiencing an entire ocean.

While Whitehead's work is fiction, adapted here by Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes, it is rooted in historical horrors. The Dozier School for Boys, a "reform school," segregated until 1966, and riddled with abuse and murder, was established in 1900 and didn't close until 2011 (which illustrates how history is always present; as James Baldwin notes in I Am Not Your Negro, "History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history." Nickel Boys structurally, formally and subject matter-wise, as it dips into different time periods, echoes this). In the years after the school's closure, unmarked graves of young men were excavated. In Nickel Boys, the brutal institution is the Nickel Academy in Florida (the film was largely shot in Louisiana). 

Teenaged Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), optimistic, about to embark to college, and on the cusp of adulthood in the early 1960s, is forced to go to the Nickel Academy after an innocuous mishap (basically, being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time). He leaves behind his grandmother, Hattie (an extremely affecting Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and a promising life ahead. Nickel Academy is a set of cramped, squat buildings, run by stern, emotionally and physically abusive men. The boys are given slop-like meals and minutes to shower, huddled together with a meager bar of soap. The white boys are allowed to play football every once in a while, the black boys are not. The school isn't sure what to do with a Mexican kid (to them, not white enough and not brown enough) who drifts in and out almost facelessly of the film's proceedings like a ghost. There are perfunctory tiers within the school, from "Grub" to "Ace"--perhaps a promise of freedom if one gets to that level. But from the get-go, the film insinuates a nauseating, sinking feeling of impossibility for these young kids. Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the two bond. As this friendship progresses, so does a powerful, symbiotic bond (illustrated aptly and beautifully by the film's use of POV). 

In its search of developing a unique cinematic language through its adaptation of a novel (the tight POVs almost feel like the act of reading a book), and in its mesmerizing and tactile invocation of and resistance to memory, Nickel Boys flourishes. Ross's direction is bold, continuously surprising and resonant. Much credit should be given to Jomo Fray, the cinematographer who also lensed the striking All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (of his work there, I wrote, "The capturing of earthy imagery, like the silt and mud under shallow water, by cinematographer Jomo Fray, who shot on 35mm, makes All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt a unique cinematic gem"). The dynamic undertaking in Nickel Boys is otherworldly to me. I can't quite wrap my head around how he and Ross (and editor Nicholas Monsour) were able to pull and shape this all together so seamlessly, while keeping the narrative focused. Because of what ultimately happens to its two lead characters, in many ways, I can't think of another way this novel could have been adapted. While there is a certain missing of seeing full-bodied performances (especially because Herisse and Wilson are so good in what we see of them), alongside the reactions of others, there is also the ticking sensation of feeling as if you are within minds (in the Q&A after the film, they called it "sentient" point-of-views). To elucidate this effect, the actors strapped cameras on themselves, including their chests and hips. It's incredible work. Perhaps the directness and tightness of Whitehead's novel as source material keeps the film from floating out into outer space (which it literally does sometimes, with insert shots evoking the dreamy, hopeful drive of America's 1960s space race). There may be some attempts to mimic Ross's efforts here, but the project as a whole is so deeply felt and realized, it seems hard to duplicate this film's particular power.

While there are some well-trodden touchstones of 60s culture that's inferred, it's always specific to relating to its characters. And sometimes, the references are ironic, strangely, and memorably presented (a paperboard standee of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the whistling of the Andy Griffith theme in the institution's clinic area). The weary 1967 song, "I Gotta Get the World Off My Back" (missing from the film's end credits; perhaps a late addition to the soundtrack), plays on the radio in an early 60s scene, but its lyrics capture so much of Elwood's predicament and future.

Besides perspective, the use of sound is also critical to the film. In an early scene, there's a small moment where Hattie is frosting a cake, and takes her fingers to the knife to wipe off some excess frosting. It's shot with a mix of a faraway shot (Elwood watching her, somewhat distantly from a doorway), close-ups, and tangible sound effects. It's these small, intimate moments that reflect not only characterization, but a certain sense of inner psychology--where does the human eye (and ear) tend to land and focus upon? When we get to a pivotal scene of abuse, the camera moves in upon extreme close-ups of still, black & white photographs (of real boys from Dozier), backed with shattering sound effects (are we listening to sound effects, or the film's gritty, unsettling, industrial score by Alex Somers & Scott Alario, or both?). I immediately thought of the opening credits of a very different film, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where there are grimy close-ups of corpses mixed with the chilling, grinding sound of a camera flash. The unsettling feeling is about what we see, hear and imagine without the camera showing much to us at all. ****

-Jeffery Berg

  

smile 2

Grim and gory and directed with smatterings of panache by Parker Finn, who also wrote and directed the sleeper hit original, Smile 2 harbors many unsettling jump scares. With its nihilistic bent and gruesome flashbacks, this one could be triggering for those trying to heal past traumas. Set mostly in New York City (though seemingly not filmed on-location; its locations are noted as being throughout the state), pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is back on the comeback scene in the aftermath of bruising drug addictions and a car wreck. In the film, Drew Barrymore, a performer who has struggled with her own past addictions, summarizes the exposition by introducing her on her talk show (in the media landscape, this would be a perfect, welcoming choice for an embittered star to appear). Riley is a Lady Gaga / Billie Eilish hybrid, short-haired and bottle-blonde, wearing oversized sweatshirts and guzzling bottles of VOSS (an antidote from her doctors against using again), and also donning glitzy get-ups for photo shoots and music videos (the film boasts a slew of original glitchy dance-pop songs, many co-written by Scott, that are, surprisingly, not that bad, and are a campy respite from the drudgery). Her mother Elizabeth (Rosemarie DeWitt) acts as her manager; she could have easily been an over-the-top stage mom, but Finn's writing and DeWitt's canny performance shape her with an underlying, simmering, passive aggressive tone. Plagued by back pain after her accident, Riley attempts to score some Vicodin from dealer Lewis (Lukas Gage). The scene is tense, with his jittery, manic presence, and tragedy predictably ensues. Riley becomes infected with the "smile curse," a brutal state of psychosis that's passed along like chain-mail--making sense only in the rules of a horror film or a feverish nightmare. 

The curse, with its reality and time-bending peculiarities, allows Finn to once again roam through macabre mind ticks and tricks freely. Here, his film delves into the pressures and stresses of being a performer within the horror genre, perhaps sometimes alluding to Natalie Portman's demented disorientation in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. The film makes an interesting companion to Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, though that film, especially with its finale, is far more effective. Lester Cohen's skillful production design captures the lavishly wall-papered, cocoon-like setting of Riley's luxury apartment, and the hallowed out insides of a shuttered restaurant, and a drug dealer's lair in winter. The film is most potent, and a bit fun, in a carnival ride way, when it strives for stripped-down scares, like when Skye's dancing troupe, turned into devilishly-grinning hallucinations, follow her around her apartment. It's when the film goes for creaky, CGI-looking effects, that the movie gets less involving, that unfortunately includes the film's ultimate landing. Still, thanks in part to Scott's oscillating emotions and bulging glares, a ride through Skye Riley's mind is a harrowing trip to endure. **1/2

-Jeffery Berg

the brutalist

In a disorienting opening sequence, László Tóth (Adrien Brody, in a skillful, intricate performance), a Hungarian Holocaust survivor fleeing war torn Europe, makes his way to America on boat, an askew Statue of Liberty emerges in perspective out of darkness. This vantage reflects Tóth's unique artistic eye as a forward-looking architect, a symbolic foreshadowing of his rocky future ahead, and is also emblematic of the topsy-turvy chaos of America itself. The simplicity of the setup is part of Director and co-writer Brady Corbet's (Vox Lux, The Childhood of a Leader) ability to synthesize large-scale ideas through visual trickery and economical brevity. Economical brevity, may not always describe The Brutalist, a simply staggering achievement for most of its over its engrossing near four hour run-time. 

After Tóth arrives in America, he reunites with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola, impactful in his runtime) to work in his modest furniture store in Philadelphia. A wealthy client comes along, Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn, perfectly dunderheaded and bratty), the son of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, consistently a mesmerizing scene-stealer), offers László and Attila an opportunity to revamp Harrison's library. This seemingly ordinary ask turns out to be a consequential turn in László's life.

The first half sets everything up meticulously, with László's work-life fluctuating in fits and starts and stops. When Pearce appears with his debonair air, mustache, and crazily crisp, magnetic mid-American accent, you know that things are going to get good (and unwieldy). His opening scene establishes his myopic selfishness and volcanic anger. A later scene where he attempts to bring László back to work, an unsettling calmness, almost tenderness. In what feels like a Biblical proposition, Harrison asks László to design and build an edifice upon a hill beyond his Doylestown estate, a community center of sorts. The building has the potential to cement legacies of both men, through Harrison’s money and László's brilliance and perfectionism. Meanwhile, through the aid of Harrison's influential circle, attempts are made for László's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, with a more prickly, complicated character than she has been usually given to work with) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), mute in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to come to America to reunite with László. 

With its engaging performances, impeccable attention to design and costuming, colors and camera angles, I was swept up, almost breathlessly so, by The Brutalist, up through its tick-tocking-down-the-15 minute intermission. Under its historical sweep, its novelistic feel of a changing post-War America (through music, technology, and industry), are its characters' barbed relationships. There's something off about László and Attila, something off between László and Harrison, and a nagging distance between László and Erzsébet, forged in the wake of their agonizing forced separation. What's nice is that the script, written by Corbet and previous collaborator Mona Fastvold (The World to Come), doesn't overexplain these cracks and fault lines, its revealed instead through the characters' communication with one another: the said and the unsaid.

It was a kick to see this section of the film fresh with a New York Film Festival audience, who applauded at the intermission title card. A rousing, crackling feeling in the air of witnessing a new classic. But an unexpected turn in the story, late into the second half, presented as a ponderous twist, took me right out of the picture, as if the film's wonky, supple inner clock suddenly broke—feeling leaden, manipulative. The moment also echoed unclear intentions of another parasitic character earlier in the film, who temporarily derails Tóth's upward mobility. I wrestled and ruminated on this turn for a while after, and ultimately concluded it as a narrative flub. A later scene where a character, coming out of shadows to emphatically voice the incident, feels as if it’s a pivotal moment straining for profundity, but comes off tinny and unpersuasive. That I even feel the need to dance around what happens seems a problem too. I look forward to when it's more widely seen and discussed. Though it began with a sort of off-kilter buoyancy, the weirdly cheeky, rushed-feeling ending to such a engrossing saga was ineffectual as well. 

Perhaps so much attention wouldn’t have been drawn to its flaws, nor the need to make comparisons, had it not had such a deliberate intermission that cuts the film into two. However, there’s something compelling in how the second half feels looser, hazier, as the sharpness of the film and its characters unravel. In a way, it shadows the action of erecting a building—its early stages all plotting, planning and mathematical precision, its later, materials and finishing touches. In fact, a sojourn to an Italian quarry for stone, is exquisite, and almost foggily surreal. 

There’s so much to appreciate and glom onto in Corbet's film. Brody’s elastic turn highlights his skills—impeccable voicework, a moody, haunting disposition. A tribute to his acting and the film's script, his character isn't as saintly as it could have been in this kind of story, instead complex, quietly thorny. On a limited budget, Judy Becker’s production design is unreal: truly thrilling work, from detailed, believable interiors to the eye-opening building designs. Shot on VistaVision, Lol Crawley’s cinematography matches the film’s sweep and unnerving intimacy. Akin to the film’s underlying sense of darkness and ambivalence, the look and color palate has a fuzzier, muddier quality than the colorful VistaVision films of its peak mid-1950s usage. Also fantastic is Daniel Blumberg’s score: the memorable main motif is almost Aaron Copland-esque in its sense of soaring Americana. The theme oscillates between a myriad of genre (classical, jazz and even pulsing dance-pop), and can be both a driving push and quietly meditative.  

For lovers of film, the film’s old-fashioned sensibility mixed with a modern coolness, is particularly refreshing today, where spectacles tend to be shiny and CGI-heavy. Then again, it comes along in the wake of two notable big-budget historical non-fiction epics from directors of significant stature, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. It takes a lot for a film to be noticed in this busy landscape, where people's scattered attentions are taken by a vast array of media. Though not without flaws, especially in its second act, The Brutalist fits in comfortably with both the sweeping nature of the best film epics of our time and of the past. ***

-Jeffery Berg