arnewsteam
Today, Amazon MGM released the official trailer for Nickel Boys from RaMell Ross, who directs and co-writes with Joslyn Barnes. Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor star in the drama which just debuted at the Telluride Film Festival.
This is the synopsis for the movie: “Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.”
Here is the trailer for Nickel Boys:
Hats off to any filmmaker with the guts to adapt a book that wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It seems like such a thankless, impossible task.
All the Light We Cannot See, The Goldfinch, The Road, American Pastoral, The Shipping News… at best, it seems like the most common reactions to turning these institutionally-recognized Great American Novels™ into a theatrical feature films is “it’s good but not as the literary classic it’s based on.”