This was a deeply weird fever-dream collage of a movie. It was as if the filmmakers set out to make an art-house film, and so they took a straightforward story and inserted apparently unrelated visual motifs (like live alligators), wove in historical footage of Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr., the space race, and flash-forwards to 2010, all while revealing the world of the movie with weird camera angles and shaky first-person filming.
The author of the source novel, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead, was inspired by a real-life runaway named Jerry Cooper, who hitched a ride with a driver of a stolen car. They were caught, and Cooper, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, was sent to a particularly brutal juvie, Florida's Dozier School for Boys. Whitehead changed a few details, researched the school to build his world, and came up with an imaginative story with an interesting (and unexpected) twist at the end. I haven't read the book, but it won a Pulitzer, and Time magazine called it one of the best books of the decade, so I suspect it's pretty good.
Unfortunately, the movie is not.
The good: It's well-cast and well-acted. The scenery was pretty, and the costumes and sets convinced me that it was the 1960s and I liked the inclusion of historical footage. The message was also good, and movies like this one are important, to remind us that human beings are capable of monstrous behavior, that if we forget the past, we'll certainly repeat our mistakes.
The interesting (but not necessarily good): first-person POV filming, which I'm not generally fan of, but it made some amount of sense here. It was also filmed in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, mirroring generations of old TVs and movies. I suspect it was intended to make the viewer feel constrained.
The bad: pretty much everything else. The fever-dream atmosphere cycled between boring, mesmerizing, and worst of all, confusing. The first-person filming was often shaky and sometimes nauseating (shades of Blair Witch). The movie often head-hopped without warning -- a common rookie mistake in writing, but this is the first time I've ever seen it in a visual format. The movie was full of weird camera angles (the director liked to film from directly above as shown in the movie poster), or with the camera turned sideways, and frequently left the main characters with their heads out of the frame. I often didn't know what was happening, so I usually felt confused and off-kilter; perhaps this was intended to immerse us in the emotions of the the main characters, but what it accomplished was pushing me out of the world of the movie, and the experience was unpleasant and difficult to watch for the wrong reasons. Human rights violations should be hard to watch, but in this instance, the artsy-fartsy movie-making weakened the power the movie might have had.
(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):
- Conclave (Absorbing conspiracy at the Vatican; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
- Emilia Pérez (Stereotypes, redemption, and transition; Cathy: 2, Chris: 2)
- Dune: Part Two (Best rendition of a classic SF novel: Cathy: 3, Chris: 3)
- The Substance (Excellent horror movie ruined by ending; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
- Wicked (Beautiful, yet boring; Cathy: 5, Chris: 5)
- Anora (Steaming pile of говно; Cathy: 6, Chris: 6)
- Nickel Boys (Civil rights meets a feverish collage of an arthouse films; Cathy: 7, Chris: 7)
- Unwatched - The Brutalist (Jewish architect rebuilds his life in America after the Holocaust)
- Unwatched - A Complete Unknown (A biopic about the early days of Bob Dylan's career)
- Unwatched - I'm Still Here/Ainda Estou Aqui (A Brazilian politician's wife makes a new life after her husband is disappeared in 1971)
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