Nickel Boys (2024), Prime, based on the 2019 novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. It was directed by RaMell Ross, who wrote the screenplay with Joslyn Barnes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_Boys

I’d read the book. So I kinda remembered what happened. The plot is straightforward moral outrage. Man traps. Jim Crow laws. Mutilating and killing black kids inside the Dozier School for Boys, renamed and repacked as The Nickel in sunny California.

An  episode of Danny Robin’s Uncanny, ‘The Haunting of Hollymont Farm’ (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0027g7b/uncanny-series-2-1-the-haunting-of-hollymount-farm) follows similar ghostly paths. Impoverished children, seemingly being taken away for a better life, starved, beaten, buried. Most nations have places hidden away like this. Britain, with the development of concentration camps during the Boer War, and the mass incarceration of Jews already in Britain and fleeing Nazi Germany on the order of Winston Churchill cannot claim the moral high ground.

Hate begins at home. Identifying The Jew. The black man. The refugee—totally other.

 How to translate racial violence from the early and late sixties and show its legacy in the moron’s moron’s America in schools, prisons and the gulags of privatised refugee camps outside the law?

RaMell Ross goes for the jump shot. The Brechtian technique of making the viewer try to work out what is happening, to whom and when. Violence is largely offscreen. Some of the most unsettling scenes do not involve documentary footage and are not in the book (or what I remember of it, which, admittedly, is never much more than shadows).

They involve Hattie, Elwood’s loving grandmother. She travels thousands of miles to visit her grandson, but it told she can’t see him, ‘because he’s sick’. She gives the ever-cynical Turner a hug instead and asks him to give her grandson a letter. The camera does that annoying thing of focusing on nobody and then parts of a body. Pieces of paper being passed to a black hand. Only her face shown.

Later, when she admits to Elwood that she’s failed him. The money she’s borrowed and spent on a lawyer to right the wrong and ‘the miscarriage of justice’ has been stolen by him and he’s fled with no forwarding address.

Melodrama?

When does a book become a film that says something new? I’m not so sure. The Grapes of Wrath? Henry Fonda. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Where’s the soft and hard boundaries? I’m not sure.  ‘A new American masterpiece’? No.   

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