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Nickel Boys Is a Cinematic Experience Unlike Any Other
In refusing a conventional, objective (and objectified) approach to suffering, director RaMell Ross resists easy attempts at pathos.
Hale County was an outgrowth of Ross’s work as a photographer, but as a moving picture it was revelatory: The director’s intense focus on mundane but lovingly captured details allowed us to imagine a whole world beyond the frame in all its wonder and sadness. One could almost view it as a cinematic corollary of the “mirror stage” of a child’s psychological development, when an infant recognizes itself in a reflection and begins to conceive of itself as a person: When we, as viewers, finally see Elwood, he becomes agonizingly real to us. Back in 2018, Hale County served as a gentle rebuke to the totalizing, omniscient approach of so many au courant and supposedly objective longitudinal documentaries, movies shot over years that purported to examine and explain the lives of marginalized people.
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