Nickel Boys is streaming on Prime Video and William Tell is in cinemas.
On Friday night, talking to Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights, I mentioned that I generally feel very little for the Oscars, don’t really care who wins and who doesn’t, and have trouble remembering anything about them once they’ve disappeared into the rear view mirror, so it is entirely appropriate that the Nights team have asked me to join them at 8.30 tonight to talk about this year’s awards (which means I now have the Disney+ feed distracting me in the background while I work).
And, in what might be the most on the nose (if not in the nose) critical metaphor, my cat made a distinctively smelly contribution to his litter box just as the telecast began which means I missed the opening montage and Oz-based opening number.
Anyway, I finally got to see my most-anticipated Best Picture nominee on Saturday night, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel (The) Nickel Boys. It wasn’t deemed worthy of a cinema release here in Aotearoa which is kind of scandalous considering that it’s one of the most ambitious and genuinely beautiful in the whole list.
We also watched Ross’s acclaimed 2019 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening and they made a fascinating double-feature. Hale County is an impressionistic portrait of the lives of young African Americans in rural Alabama over several years and it demonstrates his almost unmatched eye for an image, many of which are repeated in Nickel Boys.
The bold directorial choice in Nickel Boys is to make almost every shot a first person point-of-view, firstly from talented young student Elwood Curtis (Ethan Cole Sharp). It’s Florida during the Civil Rights era. Elwood is on his way to an all-Black college to fulfil the dreams of the doting grandmother who raised him (the always reliable Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). The car he hitches a ride with turns out to be stolen and his presence in it makes him – apparently – an accessory and he ends up in a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy.
There, Elwood and his fellow inmates are mistreated, abused and – arguably worse – forgotten by everyone except Grandma Hattie who tries in vain to get some justice for the boy.
Nickel Boys is an immaculate production and the gimmick – if that’s what it is – soon becomes essential to the film’s story and its themes. Despite the risk that it could become a litany of depressing brutality, Nickel Boys emphasises the intertwined Black lives and the power of relationship under the most testing circumstances.
I loved it and can’t wait to see what Ross does next.
Timing is everything and William Tell’s story of a community having to choose between a peace that offers the possibility of prosperity or to fight for freedom from a tyrannical and untrustworthy foreign invader felt especially pertinent this weekend.
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Every schoolchild – at least of my generation – knows the story of William Tell and the shooting of an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow and the film uses that as its foundation while broadening the story with some early 14th century geopolitical context.
Actually, the inspiration appears to be more Game of Thrones than anything else, as court intrigue and bloody violence are combined with beautiful alpine landscapes populated by a cast of ageing British veterans and young cheekbones. Swiss folk hero Tell is played a Dane, Claes Bang, and Switzerland must be a tad chagrined to be portrayed by the (Italian) Tyrolean alps.
Constantly dropping you out of the moment, though, is director Nick Hamm’s flowery script which is written in a kind of cod-Shakespeare – all “thee” and “thine” – which may be a reflection of it’s 1804 Schiller-play source material but is borderline laughable coming out of these mouths.
