Film Review of the Week

Drama

Nickel Boys (12A)

Review: The most heartbreaking chapters of human history teach us that we possess a boundless capacity to inflict unspeakable suffering on each other under the guise of progress, political dogma or religious zeal. Where darkness threatens to extinguish glimmers of hope, we endure. Nickel Boys is a harrowing drama, skilfully adapted for the screen by director RaMell Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which is based on a real-life reform school in Florida where historical allegations of abuse were confirmed by the discovery of unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar.

An elegant screenplay glides back and forth across three decades to glimpse life behind closed doors at the fictional Nickel Academy and the aftermath for one traumatised survivor as dead bodies are unearthed and shell-shocked authorities initiate a full investigation. Ross hits a stylistic home run by depicting events from the first-person perspective of two incarcerated protagonists in claustrophobic 4:3 widescreen ratio, which concentrates attention in the middle of the screen. Lead actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson are seldom glimpsed together on screen since one of them is effectively behind the camera as the point-of-view and present only by voice. It’s an intensely immersive and visceral experience that audiences could find deeply unsettling.

Teenager Elwood Curtis (Herisse) lives in racially segregated 1962 Tallahassee with his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as the Civil Rights Movement gathers momentum under impassioned activists including Martin Luther King Jr. High school teacher Mr Hill (Jimmie Fails) has high hopes for Elwood but the boy’s future is cruelly curtailed after he is wrongly accused of being an accomplice to the theft of a car. As a minor, he is dispatched to Nickel Academy.

Sadistic white administrator Spencer (Hamish Linklater) and staff including henchman Harper (Fred Hechinger) separate the black intake and exploit them as slave labour. Anyone who refuses to bend to Spencer’s will suffers horrific corporal punishment in a torture chamber outhouse. Elwood is befriended by another boy, Jack Turner (Wilson), who explains there are four ways to escape Nickel: serve time or turn 18, wait for the court to intervene, die (probably at the hands of the staff), or run and hope the guards don’t shoot you in the back.

Nickel Boys is bravura filmmaking on a par with Oscar winner The Zone Of Interest, which venerates the dauntless human spirit through a different lens. Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray orchestrate dazzling single-shot sequences like Elwood and Turner staring up at their reflections in a mirrored ceiling. The 140-minute running time is excessive for sustained sensorial overload but the script remains laser-focused on sparking vital, animated conversation about forgotten black history and exploitation.

Comedy

A Real Pain (15)

Review: Some journeys of self-discovery are metaphorical. For the bickering, 40-something cousins in Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial outing, a carefully planned road trip to reconnect with their Jewish heritage is literal, shot on location in Poland in collaboration with Warsaw-born cinematographer Michal Dymek. A Real Pain intentionally generates friction between mismatched kin, born three weeks apart, who claim to share the closeness of real brothers.

The duo comprises Eisenberg’s painfully earnest husband and father, whose young son is obsessed with tall buildings, and an emotionally volatile free spirit played with Oscar-tipped gusto by Kieran Culkin, who bluntly says what no one else is thinking and still thrives on his innate charm. He is the kind of garrulous, easy-going nomad who lights up a room and proceeds to relieve himself on everyone and everything inside it, and sermonises in snappy soundbites (“Money’s like heroin for boring people”) which lose their lustre on closer inspection.

Eisenberg’s script deposits the dysfunctional duo in foreign climes and witnesses the fallout (through trembling fingers) as they wrestle with glaringly obvious differences and avoid discussing the event that almost separated them for good. The ebb and flow of character conflict sometimes feels forced and Culkin’s showstopping performance sucks the oxygen out of the rest of the film, leaving Eisenberg to nestle in a pigeon hole as a neurotic and socially awkward chatterbox who is summed up as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late”.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Culkin) travel from New York to Warsaw to celebrate their late grandmother Dory. Benji has been on a “downhill funk” since her death. “She was my favourite person in the world,” he professes. Consequently, the cousins join a heritage tour led by British guide James (Will Sharpe), who is a scholar of eastern European studies at the University of Oxford.

The tour party includes 60-something divorcee Marcia Kramer (Jennifer Grey), whose mother was a survivor of the Holocaust, recently retired Jewish couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane Binder (Liza Sadovy), and Rwandan genocide survivor Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who converted to Judaism 10 years ago. As James shepherds his flock to culturally important sites, culminating in a visit to a preserved Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Majdanek, David and Benji’s strained relationship unravels in front of fellow travellers.

Bookended by close-ups of Culkin’s perplexed face, A Real Pain is a heartfelt story of estrangement and reconciliation that traipses over the same terrain as Treasure, starring Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry, released in June last year. Eisenberg enthusiastically brandishes sardonic wit to delight in his characters’ toe-curling discomfort. Behind the camera, he engineers a delightfully anti-climactic finale at grandma Dory’s home that neatly sidesteps gooey sentimentality and is authentically unsatisfying. Some final destinations are a letdown.