Review: Rebecca Hall’s excellent ‘Passing’ tells a story of racial identity in 1920s New York
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From the hushed misterioso quality of its opening sequence to the nervous ambiguity of its coda, writer-director Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” (premiering on Netflix Nov. 10) floats like a mirage of the past — late 1920s New York City, mostly in Harlem.
Yet nothing in it feels all that distant. We aren’t sitting back at a remove with this film, even if much of its emotional texture simmers rather than boils. “Passing” pays close attention to everything its excellent main actors do in between the lines delineating a dangerous friendship.
We first meet Irene (Tessa Thompson), a light-skinned Black woman of some means, married to a quiet, sardonic Black doctor (André Holland). They have two children and a comfortable life, though Irene seems to be tipping around the edges of it.
Hall’s adaptation of the remarkable 1929 Nella Larsen novel begins with a rare, possibly unique act of “passing” for Irene. Head lowered, hat shielding most of her face, Irene silently convinces a whites-only hotel tea room that she’s indeed one of Them, not the forbidden Other. Once inside, she spies an old college friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), lighter-skinned and now passing as white, in a marriage to a blustery, back-slapping white racist (Alexander Skarsgard). He does not know his wife’s secret.
In the novel Clare is described as being “catlike,” a seductive, shape-shifting manipulator of wiles and great charm. “Passing” unfolds as a story of many secrets, both external (when will Clare’s deception crumble?) and, regarding Irene, internal (is she remotely fulfilled? Is she attracted to Clare’s life? To Clare?) Hall’s a tremendous actor, working here behind the camera, and what Thompson and Negga accomplish on screen in this extraordinarily detailed portrait becomes a master class in incremental revelations — the hallmark of the director’s own best performances.
As Clare insinuates herself into Irene’s life, and home, the cross-currents deepen. Irene volunteers for what her husband cynically describes as “your precious Negro League.” A famous white writer (Bill Camp) also works from the social welfare organization, and while most of the story remains tightly focused on the women, the world these women navigate, or can’t, emerges in tantalizing fragments. Hall recently told the Chicago Tribune the central, rekindled but hazardous friendship of Irene and Clare is built upon the idea of “two female characters, two sides of a coin, built for each other’s destruction.” This is not melodrama, however. It’s subtler, with a deceiving calm baked into the evocations of its time and place.
Hall shot “Passing” in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio deployed by filmmaking of the era depicted, in supple black and white. Cinematographer Edu Grau’s strategies favor reflective, angled mirror images — literally, characters photographed in mirrors — and reminders that fixed identity is elusive in this universe. Throughout the film we hear composer Devonte Hines’ bittersweet, ghost-shrouded piano theme, and it’s just one component of a very rich sound design. Costume designer Marci Rodgers works freely and sometimes out of period, giving Clare in particular a forward-leaning character line suggesting bold, dangerous women of ‘40s or even ‘50s Hollywood.
The result, as Hall said, is “more emotionally evocative than it is necessarily historically accurate.” Whether for reasons relating to a tight budget or poetic allusion, the streets of this 1929 Harlem feel not quite natural, or full. It’s a reflection, I think, of how Irene’s carefully prescribed life feels before Clare shimmers into view, a mirage within a mirage.
After a brief theatrical run, “Passing” parks itself on Netflix this week. I worry about what the streaming platform’s algorithmic bots (or, worse, actual humans) will do to entice a menu-grazing subscriber into watching. (No sign of “Liked C. Thomas Howell in “Soul Man”? You might enjoy this!” yet.) The film’s rhythm is careful, methodical. Here and there, Hall lets that rhythm slacken and with Thompson’s Irene, the less overtly dramatic of the two women, there are moments when the ambiguity skirts opacity.
On the other hand: A lesser director, working in a clunky-realism vein with less skilled designers and especially performers, might’ve turned “Passing” into a conventional something or other. In novel form, and in Hall’s beautiful adaptation, it is anything but conventional.
‘Passing’ — 4 stars (out of four)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material, some racial slurs and smoking)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: Streaming premiereNov. 10 on Netflix; continues at Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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