ramell ross

Nickel Boys (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King.  Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions.  Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs.  As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem.  Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics.  Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.

The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters.  Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system.  It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America.  The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice.  To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.

If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive.  I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed.  If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc.  I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film.  Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell. 

-Brandon Ledet

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The microbudget documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening is the debut feature as a director for fine art photographer RaMell Ross. I doubt that was initially the film’s intended form. With the fractured, narrative-light meandering of a photojournal in motion, Hale County This Morning, This Evening plays more like a diary than a proper documentary. Ross appears to be gathering moving images to either calcify a concurrent photography project or to supplement those photographs with a curated installation piece. Either way, the experiment makes for rich raw material to pull from in the editing room when repurposed for a feature-length non-fiction piece, no matter how disjointed the result. Like all D.I.Y. art projects (especially ones this disinterested in narrative) there’s a hit or miss quality to Hale County on a minute to minute basis, but in its best moments it strikes the exact notes of beauty & nightmarish atmosphere you’d want to see in a microbudget, swing-for-the-fences debut. A lot of that artistry seems to be the result of editing-room tinkering in post-production, but it’s all built on the foundation of Ross’s already-established documentarian eye.

A large part of the reason RaMell Ross’s photography work lends itself so well to documentary filmmaking is that he already was documenting little-seen niches of life before he thought to set those images in motion. Ross’s latest project is portraits of black lives in the rural American South, finding eerie beauty & tragic calm in lives marginalized by poverty. More importantly, though, his work’s fine art formalism brings a distinct cinematic eye to his newfound medium so that these portraits don’t feel so much like matter-of-fact dispatches from lives on the fringe, but rather expressions of beauty and deep guttural moans of pain & frustration. The spaces he documents in Hale County, Alabama provide a very grounded, recognizable tapestry of black lives in the modern, rural American South: churches, dorm rooms, trailer parks, gymnasiums, bowling alleys, maternity wards. They don’t amount to much aesthetically, but Ross’s patience & detail-oriented eye allows them to develop into a larger tapestry that encompasses birth & death, time & the cosmos, real life & the world of our dreams. He asks abstract questions like “What is the orbit of our dreams?” and then “answers” them with small, candid moments of sweat dripping on a basketball court or the Sun vibrating across the sky in a time-elapsed road trip. It’s an eerie, disjointed gestalt — the kind of distinctly cinematic eye usually not afforded places like Hale County, Alabama.

As you might expect with a narratively disinterested, tonally experimental art project, Hale County‘s greatest strengths lie in the intensity & memorability of isolated images. Much of the film patiently documents the minor moments of toddlers’ playtime, stray kittens, wandering cattle, and video game “parties” in crowded living rooms. Yet, there are also spectacular moments of a one-of-a-kind novelty: intense Southern storms swarming in on tiny, unprepared human bodies; a mother’s eyes rolling around her skull on pain mediation during an intense birth; a prankster jokingly attempting to view a solar eclipse through a waffle fry. There’s an undeniable political weight to this style of portraiture as well, especially in the financial & physical conditions of the setting and the quiet presence of police lights that bathe & invade those spaces in regular intervals. I’m not convinced that Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a slam dunk (to borrow terminology from the film’s strong focus on local basketball culture), but it’s certainly a wonder to behold in its best moments and an emotionally harrowing experience even in its worst. The only question now is how much greater could RaMell Ross’s cinematic eye become if he set out to make a feature film on purpose at the start of a project, instead of finding one after the fact in the editing room?

-Brandon Ledet