The initial scenes of Nickel Boys are somehow both vivid and vague, like one’s own earliest childhood memories. We’re seeing the point of view of Elwood, a bright, impressionable African-American kid in 1960s Florida. The warm imagery and the overheard conversations and broadcasts evoke a potent sense of the remembrance of things past, but also suggest a small child’s grasp of them.
Then we see Elwood’s point of view years later as a teenager, when he accepts a very unfortunate ride while he’s trying to get to a school for gifted kids to which he’s been accepted. It’s at this point that Nickel Boys becomes a nightmare. Elwood is sentenced to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school for boys. He’s completely innocent, but that scarcely matters; even a guilty kid shouldn’t be subjected to what he finds there.
Directed by RaMell Ross from a script he wrote with Joslyn Barnes, the film is based on Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, based, in turn, on the horrors and abuses of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida throughout much of the 20th century. It’s all shot in first-person point of view, and this may sound oppressive or stunt-like, but the movie is loosened when it allows us a second point of view, that of Turner, a tougher, less idealistic kid with whom Elwood bonds. We jump from one set of eyes to the other, and Ross gets across not just different vantages but different sensibilities.
Although we’re shown little physical abuse onscreen, the film’s atmosphere of stifling misery and terror is powerful. Though it’s heartbreakingly sad, Nickel Boys is surprisingly not depressing, because the friendship that grows between Elwood and Turner carries a quiet charge of love that transcends the tragedy.
Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, who play Elwood and Turner as teens, are both touching. But the one real showcase performance that the movie allows is that of Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother. She gets across an almost exalted level of love and pain and pride without the slightest overplaying.
Also opening this weekend is Wolf Man, another “reboot” of a classic Universal monster property in collaboration with Blumhouse Productions. This one has no connection to 1941’s classic The Wolf Man, nor with 2010’s misfired remake The Wolfman. In terms of quality, though, it’s nothing compared to the original, but it’s terrific compared to the remake.
It’s a lean and mean, stripped-down werewolf movie; no full moon, no gypsies, no wolfsbane. Thematically, it’s about the terror of feeling unable to protect your family, and the ancillary worry that this fear itself will lead you to harm them. This isn’t really subtextual; co-screenwriters Leigh Whannell and Corbett Tuck put it right in the mouth of our hero Blake (Christopher Abbott).
This glum urban Mr. Mom has dragged his journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) out into the Oregon wilderness to clean out the isolated house of his paranoid survivalist-type father (Sam Jaeger) who has been missing long enough now that he’s been declared dead. The evening at the old homestead does not run smoothly, and soon the wife and daughter find themselves besieged by lycanthropes within and without.
The movie’s austerity and lack of old-school hokum may feel like a cheat at first, but director Whannell of the Saw flicks, who also directed the pretty scary 2020 version of The Invisible Man, handles many scenes with panache – there’s a splendid, chillingly imaginative sequence involving a spider. And the knotted-up anxiety at the movie’s emotional core will be easily recognizable to parents. There’s also a certain Sturm und Drang romanticism to the film’s portrait of a father fighting to save his family even as his own humanity is draining away.
What I liked best about Wolf Man, however, may have been the handling of the wife’s character. In the early scenes Garner, under her frizzy blond mop, seems set up to be a stereotypical uptight, shrewish career woman. But as the movie progresses, she shows herself to be resourceful and brave; she comes through when things get hairy.
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