Passing (2021)
dir. Rebecca Hall
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 Netflix
It’s serendipitous that I came across the film Passing when I did. I happened to screen it as I’m almost half way through a staggering book about race – and so much more – in America by Isabel Wilkerson titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I’ve been making my way through Caste for about two months now. I’m a notoriously slow reader, and I’ve found myself only able to read so much of this particular book in one sitting. Wilkerson includes gut-wrenching, disturbing examples of the rigid hierarchical system in place in America to keep Black people at the bottom of society, known as a caste system.
The serendipity comes in one text informing and unlocking nuance in the other. It’s easier to recognize, because of what I’ve read in Caste, that everything you see and hear in Passing is a result of white supremacy. The very idea that some members of the subordinated – read: Black – group could gain the privileges and respect of the dominant – read: white – group because their skin is light enough to pass for a white person speaks to the ugly and destructively nonsensical idea of white supremacy and using skin color as a way to asses human worth.
The very fact that the systemic and institutionally sanctioned rape of enslaved women at the hands of their captors led to lighter-skinned Black offspring who could pass in white society speaks to the vileness of racism, chattel slavery, and its legacy, one that persists to the present day.
Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, Passing tells the story of two Black women, Irene "Reenie" Redfield and Clare Bellew. Old childhood friends who had lost touch, Reenie runs into Clare by chance one afternoon while trying to escape the New York City heat in the cool parlor of an air-conditioned hotel. Reenie is taking the rarely-used, for her, advantage of her light skin to gain entrance to the whites-only hotel. She learns that passing is a way of life for Clare. When her father died, she explains to Reenie, Clare was raised by her two white aunts. She lives as a white woman, having married a white man who doesn’t know her secret.
Passing is the directorial debut of English actress Rebecca Hall. I highly recommend Hall’s mercurial performance in 2016’s Christine, in which she plays Christine Chubbuck, a real-life Florida TV news reporter and anchor struggling with depression. Chubbuck took her own life in 1974 live on air.
By looking at her, you might assume, as I did, that Hall is white. That led me to question, when I learned that she had adapted Larsen’s novel for the screen and was directing Passing, why a white woman was telling this story. It turns out that Hall has a complicated relationship with race within her own family, which she details in a moving piece she wrote for Vogue in anticipation of Passing’s release. Her grandfather, unbeknownst to her, was a light-skinned African-American man who was able to enter white society.
It was a taboo subject in the Hall household. That’s not hard to believe when you consider a scene that comes early in Passing. After reuniting in the hotel lobby, Clare invites Reenie up to her and her husband’s room. The Bellews are visiting from Chicago on business, but they are thinking about relocating permanently to New York City.
The two women spend time catching up and eventually Clare’s husband, John, returns from running an errand. Their conversation turns to “Negroes,” and John, speaking as only a white person who assumes he’s surrounded by his own kind would, signals his antipathy towards the subjugated class. “You dislike Negroes, Mr. Bellew,” Reenie asks. “No, no, not at all. I hate them,” John says with a laugh.
At this point, it’s important to single out the brilliant and heartrending performances from Passing’s two leads. Tessa Thompson plays Reenie with a quiet dignity that acts as a thin veneer papering over the pain and trauma that living in an oppressed class has caused her. Ruth Negga is Clare, and the multiple notes the talented actress must hit in the aforementioned scene alone is stunning. The smile on Negga’s face, as Clare laughs at her husband’s joke, belies the pain and panic that registers in the actor’s eyes as her character looks at Reenie, beseeching her friend not to divulge her secret. There’s also a deadness to her eyes that comes in knowing that the man she has married unwittingly hates the core of her very identity.
Indelible moments like these – there are a handful of them throughout Passing’s tight 99-minute run time – are interspersed within Hall’s almost slow-cinema aesthetic. Hall and her cinematographer, Eduard Grau, who shot the gorgeous film A Single Man for Tom Ford in 2009, use starkly beautiful black-and-white photography and the boxy Academy ratio to capture the Jazz Age setting.
Hall’s lyrical style and sparing use of dialog put me instantly in mind of Transcendental Cinema master Paul Schrader – who has his own ugly issues concerning race – and his recent slow cinema entries like the masterpiece First Reformed and The Card Counter.
Hall brings the Harlem Renaissance to life in her picture. Several outings to jazz clubs that Reenie and her husband, Brian, enjoy with Clare add another layer to this story of the rotten fruit of a racially-based hierarchy. One of the first explosions of art and thought centered around Black consciousness and identity in America is a fitting backdrop for Passing.
Character actor Bill Camp adds another layer to the film as Hugh Wentworth, the white friend of the Redfields who might genuinely be supportive of the Black Liberation cause, or who might simply be intoxicated by the “exotic” culture fueling the Harlem Renaissance. The ambiguity of the character is itself fascinating.
The immensely talented André Holland – who popped onto my radar in 2016 in Barry Jenkins’s brilliant Moonlight – is a quiet marvel in Passing. Holland’s Brian, a doctor, is fed up with America’s distain for his race; he’s ready to live abroad, James Baldwin style, but Reenie is committed to making her home country a better place through her charity work with the NAACP.
The two argue about how much to teach their young sons about racism. A fight between Brian and Reenie erupts when Brian tells his children about a lynching in the news. Reenie wants her children to enjoy the innocence of childhood for as long as possible; their father wants to prepare them for the world in which they live.
I wrote towards the beginning of my review that everything you see or hear in Passing is a result of white supremacy, but Hall sneaks a critique of the patriarchy into her screenplay as well.
There’s an unspoken contentious dynamic between Reenie and Brian when it comes to sex. He seems frustrated that they aren’t having it enough. That leads to more tension when it becomes obvious to Reenie that he and Clare are becoming closer now that she spends more time in Harlem with the young couple. John is often out of town on business, which allows Clare to spend time among other Black people, a connection to her culture that she has missed.
A chance encounter between John, Reenie, and another of Reenie’s friends, one who could never pass as white, leads to the devastating climax of Passing. Without spoiling too much, I can relate that what makes the final minutes of the movie so emotionally pulverizing lies within its ambiguity. A single motion that Reenie makes seconds before tragedy strikes can be read in multiple ways, either absolving Reenie of the tragedy or implicating her in it. Hall’s impeccable staging of this moment heightens the ambiguity and the film’s ultimate emotional impact.
Passing is a strong, self-assured first effort for Rebecca Hall as a director. Her film confronts the worst sins of American society. They are sins that have their roots in the year 1619 and that continue to bear ugly fruit in the here and now.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Passing is a cogent rumination on the vileness of Jim Crow-era American society. Rebecca Hall’s quiet aesthetic dovetails nicely with her examination of romantic, sexual, and race politics.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The film begins with a technique, and uses it several times throughout, in which the frame is out of focus and the sounds we hear are muffled. Both become clear together in a slow, ethereal process.
- The movie leans on a few pieces by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou for it’s soundtrack. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the Ethiopian nun, who recorded her piano-centric music in the 1960s, was also featured in another movie I reviewed earlier in the year, the lyrical 2020 documentary Time. The songs are beautiful, but I felt Passing was late to the party because I heard the same music used so recently in another film.
- In the notes I took while watching Passing, I jotted down that I was interested to find out if the movie condemns Clare. I don’t think that it does. It offers a humane portrait of a woman surviving the best she can in an intolerably unjust system.
- Hall and cinematographer Grau’s use of shallow focus throughout Passing is gorgeous.
- The final shot of the movie is a slow zoom-out of the top of an apartment complex in a snowstorm. I’m almost convinced I saw a pair of eyes superimposed over two corners of the building, as if they’re passing judgement on what we’ve seen. Upon reflection, I’m pretty sure those eyes were a figment of my imagination.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Passing is available in a limited theatrical release and on Netflix, which is how I screened it.