Passing (2021)

(Tessa Thompson as Irene Redfield in Passing)

(Streaming on Netflix beginning Wednesday, November 10)

This movie is adapted from the 1929 novel Passing, by Nella Larsen, one of the most prominent writers of the Harlem Renaissance. When the book first appeared, it was seen as a powerful expose of the perils of traversing racial identity, and it’s been fervently interpreted that way ever since.

Rebecca Hall, the white writer/director, clearly embraces that interpretation.  She telescopes the novel’s plot while still revering the two troubled Black women at its heart.  She also makes them beacons into the dash and daring that swirled through the Harlem of the 1920s

The woman at the center is Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson), a happily married Black woman whose skin is fair enough that she occasionally – circumspectly, cautiously – "passes" for white.

But, importantly, that's not a ruse Irene has built her life around.  Outwardly serene, she unquestionably loves her darker-skinned doctor husband, Brian (André Holland), and their sons, Theodore and Junior, with whom she lives in a large, comfortable Harlem brownstone.

After a morning of shopping in mid-Manhattan, Irene needs a break and cautiously enters the austere tea room of the Drayton Hotel.  To those of us in the audience, Irene's facial features seem markedly African-American, but her nervousness signals that in the bright glare of the afternoon sun streaming from the tea room's tall windows, she hopes she won't be picked out as a Negro.

The way she slightly bows her head under the brim of her wide summer hat doesn’t suggest that she's successfully "passing" in what appears to be a whites-only enclave.  Actually, written across her face is fear that her race might be discovered.  She's not concealing it.  She's trusting, and probably in large part imagining, that it won't be detected.

Settling down with her day's packages beside her, Irene runs into the story’s other unquiet woman, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), a friend from years before who informs Irene that she's married to a well-off white man, has a daughter, and has been successfully passing for white for a number of years.  Clare, we're meant to understand, is light-skinned enough to have pulled off this life-altering deception.

They go up to Clare’s hotel room, where they're soon joined by Clare's husband, Jack (Alexander Skarsgard).  As the couple interact, Irene realizes that Clare's deception has triumphed.

Jack believes Clare is white, and he unhesitatingly concludes Irene must be, too.  He freely, delightedly, denigrates Blacks.  In heartily joking fashion, he tells Irene that his nickname for Clare is "Nig", since he suspects his wife's complexion has been slowly darkening during the years they've been married.

A shocked Irene, fully grasping that Jack hasn't recognized her own racial identity, departs, shaken at what her onetime friend has become – and has let herself in for.

First haltingly, then hypnotically, the two women revive their friendship, which turns into a character test for both.  Clare, touched by an urge to "rejoin" the race, becomes a regular visitor at Irene's home, and takes a fond liking to Brian and the couple's two sons.  She even bonds with the family's dark-skinned housekeeper, Zulena (Ashley Ware Jenkins).

(Ruth Negga as Clare and Tessa Thompson as Irene in Passing)

More and more Clare insinuates herself into Irene's apparently tranquil life.  Behind her husband Jack's back, Clare becomes a semi-regular on the Harlem social scene, attending interracial dances and card parties with Irene and Brian, half-flirting with Black men, even casting what seems to Irene a covetous eye on Brian.

But unlike Clare, Brian strongly identifies with the Black struggle.  He understands his and his family's social jeopardy in America, and thinks it’s a parental duty to inform Junior and Ted about lynching and other injustices.  Irene objects, saying it’s too soon for the boys to learn about the cruelties of the world, that the family's "happiness" is paramount.

Irene, we come to see, is "passing" as profoundly as Clare is.  She's mistaken her family’s rise into comfortable middle-class ease for "safety".  She sees Clare as the one in danger, risking the exposure of her deception.

In setting these two women’s calculated strategies alongside one another, the movie becomes a sleek act of portraiture, a physical rendering of Larsen’s incisive, often witty, prose.

One reason I was so spellbound became clear when I saw Passing in September at the New York Film Festival.  In the Q&A afterwards, Hall let it be known that she’d storyboarded – that is, made meticulous drawings laying out set details and camera angles – every scene of her script well before consulting with any collaborators.

That concerted early preparation pays off handsomely. The movie looks ravishing.  Its shimmering black and white cinematography (by Eduard Grau), far from neutralizing feelings, drives a viewer further into the characters' minds and motives.  It's not just that the action is methodically laid out.  Irene and Clare feel trapped within it, circumscribed, with nowhere outside the movie's stark frames to flee to.  And Devonté Hynes’ haunting score seems to ripple across the fraught women’s nerves.

We watch Clare scurry back and forth between opposing worlds, one stifling, with her husband, the other liberating, in a boundary-breaking Harlem.  Both Larsen and Hall want to demonstrate that “passing” equals putting on an invisible mask, and masks can slip.

The movie itself has guises, too.  Hall stressed in that Q&A that she cast Thompson and Negga in the full expectation that an audience watching would know that they’re Black.  The characters might be trying to pass, but the actors playing them are doing no such thing.  They bring a distressed humanity to the roles, overriding appearances.

I don't know how the performances could be improved upon.  Thompson shades Irene's assurance with a palpable anxiety, poised as this middle-class Harlem matron strives to be.  It has to be one of the most delicately wrought performances of the year.

Negga sensibly doles out the pathos of Clare's dilemma.  Clare is self-dramatizing, but Negga the actress doesn't spare her from looking sadly, disastrously misguided.  (I could hear faint echoes of Blanche Du Bois in Negga's throaty delivery, and that's not a complaint – I'd pay serious money to see Negga in that role.)

Holland keeps Brian's love for Irene and his exasperation – and fascination – with the flighty Clare in perfect balance.  Which makes his resolve that it’s not too early for his young sons to confront social realities even more believable.

Passing is so amply yet sharply composed that shot after shot knocked me out.  No setting or prop or studied camera angle felt ill-chosen.  Yet as visually stunning as the movie is, its focus on the inner life is what most reverberates.  It looks beyond skin color to gaze into another person’s eyes, the better to see within.  Critical Face Theory.