Using Gimmickry for Good
‘Here’ and ‘Nickel Boys,’ reviewed.
IN THE CONTEXT OF ARTISTRY, “gimmicks” are often considered a negative, something to be avoided. And while there certainly are bad, gimmicky movies and techniques—many of which can be found in the oeuvre of William Castle, who pioneered things like seats that vibrated during scary moments in The Tingler, a precursor of sorts to the 4DX seats of today; some of which, like Sensurround, presaged technology (surround sound) that would become standard in the filmgoing experience—I’ve always thought of “gimmick” as descriptive rather than pejorative.
Both Here and Nickel Boys are, at some level, gimmick movies: They’re both trying something interesting and different in a way that will be offputting to some viewers. (One might describe these maneuvers as “formal tricks” if one were more inclined to find “gimmick” offensive in this context.) But the gimmicks their directors deploy aren’t used for cheap thrills or simply so the auteurs can be thought of as unique. Robert Zemeckis in Here and RaMell Ross in Nickel Boys are expanding the visual language of cinema in a way that might not work for most movies, and may not work for many viewers, but certainly works for what they’re trying to accomplish in these films.
(I will be discussing some plot points of both pictures but will attempt to avoid anything that might harm your enjoyment of the film; consider this a spoiler warning, if that’s the sort of thing you require.)
In Here, the gimmick is that the entire movie—save for one brief sequence right at the end—takes place entirely in the same piece of land in what we now think of as Pennsylvania. To say it takes place in the same “room” wouldn’t be quite right, since Here begins in the age of the dinosaurs, moving through the Ice Age and into the time of the Indians, into the Colonial era, before settling us primarily in the twentieth century. Our view is static but our view of time is decidedly nonlinear, hopping back and forth between all of these times to create a sense of the ways in which actions echo through the ages.
The bulk of the story follows Richard Young (Tom Hanks) and Margaret Young (Robin Wright), a couple of Boomers who spend most of their lives in the house built on the site where our camera is situated. Richard’s father, Al (Paul Bettany), and mother, Rose (Kelly Reilly), bought the house following his return from World War II; Richard and Margaret get pregnant, get married, get jobs, and, finally, get stuck.
All the while, as we watch Richard abandon his dreams of becoming an artist to earn a living and Margaret die a little inside as she realizes they’re never getting a place of their own, we cut back to the past where we see the conflict between those who yearned for American independence and those who didn’t, those who hoped to slip the surly bonds and fly freely and those who wanted to stay closer to Earth, and those who, um, invented the La-Z-Boy.1 Again, the camera is static, rigidly stuck; the whole thing is either shot against a standard green screen or in an LED volume, allowing Zemeckis to change the action in the background while leaving those in the foreground alone. He seamlessly melds and merges eras, flowing in and out of time, guiding us into the past and back to the present without the aid of a DeLorean.
This sometimes gives the picture a stage-play quality; characters will often walk to the front of the frame so they can monologue while supporting actors flit around in the background, as if addressing a seated audience. (Indeed, the weakest aspect of the film are these asides; Paul Bettany delivers his speeches with an overwrought pathos that makes the first half of the movie occasionally feel like a ham-handed high school reimagining of Death of a Salesman.) The overt artificiality of all this left me resistant to the film’s intrinsic power at first; I simply resented the artifice.
But once Richard and Margaret are grown and we start to stick with them more, and once the rhythms and rhymes of history have fully asserted themselves, I was simply overcome by Here’s straightforward earnestness and power. Though Zemeckis, who cowrote the screenplay with Eric Roth, occasionally veers toward mawkishness, Hanks and Wright are powerful enough to reassert control of the material and keep it human and humane. Considering the creative team of Zemeckis, Roth, Hanks, and Wright, comparisons to Forrest Gump will be inevitable, and while Here absolutely feels as though it’s in conversation with that film, it’s also almost aggressively the inverse of their previous effort.
On the most obvious level, it’s different because Forrest Gump hops around the world, putting its protagonist in the midst of the biggest events of the twentieth century in America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. A sort of Boomer travelogue. But Here is a movie about the average Boomer, the guy who stayed home and raised kids and occasionally watched the news but never partook of it. It’s the grunt’s-eye view of history, the nitty-gritty of paying off loans and getting kids ready for adulthood and worrying about taxes and realizing that it’s not all going to work out like you wanted.
Here is about life as most people live it, have lived it, will live it. It’s neither grandiose nor tragic; it simply is. If it takes a gimmick to help us understand that, well, so be it.
NICKEL BOYS USES ANOTHER GIMMICK of perspective to tell its story. Like Here, it hops backward and forward through time, though its movements are more limited, jumping between Jim Crow–era Florida and a few glimpses of a character’s future in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. But the point of view is constantly a POV-shot. At least in the past, where we follow Elwood (Ethan Herisse) as he tries to survive his time in the Nickel Academy, a juvenile detention facility. The film unspools as if shot by Elwood’s eyes; we only see his face in the reflection of a mirror or a piece of glass.
And then, after a bit, we see Elwood’s face through the eyes of Turner (Brandon Wilson), his only real friend at the facility. For the rest of the film, we hop back and forth between Turner and Elwood’s POV, except when we flash forward to the future, where an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs) is both dealing with the trauma he accumulated at Nickel Academy and looking at stories about bodies recovered at the youth prison. Young men murdered by the corrupt administrator, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), a sociopath who has hidden behind the power of white supremacy to get away with God only knows how many crimes.
Crucially, when we jump to Older Elwood, the perspective is not quite POV; in video game parlance, it’s a third-person “over-the-shoulder” POV. We see the back of his head, but never his face, creating a slight distancing effect compared to the scenes set in the 1960s. As if we are not seeing the world through Elwood’s eyes at all, in stark contrast to the initial setup. As if he has dissociated a bit, become an entirely different person due to what he has suffered.
Again, as with Here, I resisted the formal trick deployed by RaMell Ross for a while. It’s self-conscious in a way that’s mildly off-putting, though not as aggressively disconcerting as the maddening Hardcore Henry, a 2015 action flick that also used the first-person POV. That film did so specifically to ape a video game’s sensibility. Nickel Boys uses the first-person POV and the elliptical nature of the plotting to create a more dreamlike view of the world; this movie owes much more to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life than to the PlayStation.
But again, as with Here, once I gave myself over to the film’s rhythms, my aesthetic annoyances started to slide away. And once you realize, in the last half-hour or so, precisely why the POV shifts between Elwood and Turner, and why that distancing over-the-shoulder POV predominates in the present tense, the form and function of Ross’s maneuver neatly synthesize into a pleasing whole. Though “pleasing” is a hard word to use here, given the horrors we see Elwood and Turner suffer at the Nickel Academy, the ruin it leaves their lives and their bodies and their minds.
Here and Nickel Boys cover a similar stretch of American history, though the perspectives of the participants couldn’t be further apart. They’re both odd, uniquely powerful films. They used their gimmicks for good.
Here is now playing on video-on-demand, as well as a handful of theaters around the country. If you’re in New York City, it is playing at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday, December 29, at 5:00 p.m.; one hopes that Dave Kehr and his team at MoMA are getting an early jump on reclaiming a film that has been really unfairly savaged by critics.
Nickel Boys is now in limited release in New York City and will expand to Los Angeles and beyond in the weeks to come.
As best as I can tell from three minutes of Googling, the La-Z-Boy was invented in Michigan. Stolen valor, etc.