“Passing,” Reviewed: Rebecca Hall’s Anguished Vision of Black Identity

Rebecca Hall’s directorial début, “Passing,” based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name, is one of the rare book adaptations that brings a literary style to the screen. The film’s sense of style is more than mere ornament; it embodies the confrontation with circumstances—practical, emotional, historical—at the heart of the story. “Passing” (coming to Netflix on Wednesday) is a period piece, set in Harlem during Prohibition, just before the Depression. The movie achieves an ample, resonant reconstruction of that era, but it doesn’t feature colossal sets or give the sense that entire neighborhoods were transformed for the purpose of shooting. Instead, Hall uses sharply defined locations imaginatively and conjures the time through her original way with light, texture, and gesture, all redolent of a storied yet troubled past. The result is an emotional immediacy that’s all the sharper for its subtlety, all the more intense for its contemplative refinement, and that, above all, gives apt expression to the film’s mighty and agonized subject.

The movie stars Tessa Thompson as Irene Redfield, a woman of about thirty who lives in a Harlem town house with her husband—Brian (André Holland), a doctor—and their two sons, one a child and the other on the cusp of puberty. She’s an activist who works as a volunteer for a (fictitious) charitable organization called the Negro League while also running the household. A light-skinned Black woman, she’s taken for white by white people in the course of her errands outside Harlem on a hot summer day. At a hotel café, Irene encounters Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), a friend from high school whom she hasn’t seen in a dozen years. Clare, too, has light skin—but, unlike Irene, she intentionally passes for white. She’s married to a wealthy white banker named John (Alexander Skarsgård) and lives her entire life amid white society. Clare’s reunion with Irene (whom she calls Reenie) awakens a long-suppressed desire to exist among Black people, to affirm her own identity without shame or fear. Clare imposes herself on the Redfield household, befriends Brian and the boys, takes part in Negro League social events run by Irene—and, in doing so, knowingly confronts the grave risk that John will find out that she’s Black.

The daily anguish that passing causes Clare is revealed during the women’s initial reunion. In Clare’s hotel room (she and John are on an extended visit from their home in Chicago), John comes in and—taking Irene for white, too—makes racist remarks that include the N-word. He calls Clare by a horrific nickname, based on the color of her skin (he takes it for something like olive), which Clare is obligated to laugh at daily. Irene doesn’t challenge the racist epithets, but she does ask John his opinion of Negroes. He responds that he hates them but that Clare hates them even more and refuses even to hire Black maids (unbeknownst to him, of course, not from hatred but from fear). The tension that Clare endures suffuses the film like a stifled scream. When the two women discuss their home lives, Clare says that she and John have only one child, a daughter, and that she refuses to have any more—because her pregnancy was a time of harrowing anxiety lest the baby turn out to be dark-skinned.

The hatred in the air, the ambient racism—spoken and unspoken, acted upon or merely built into the ordinary habits of society—is the basic framework for Hall’s movie. It’s a matter of marital discord between Irene and Brian, who wants the family to emigrate from the United States to Europe in order to avoid American bigotry. Despite her involvement with the Negro League, a civic organization that apparently promotes the interests of Black people, Irene is trying to raise her sons without reference to the terrors that Blacks face in American society—she tries to prevent Brian from telling them about lynchings. (He persists nonetheless and tells them about the murder of John Carter, in Little Rock, Arkansas.) When one of their sons is called the N-word, the experience is as much of a surprise to him as it is a shock.

Clare’s seemingly passive weathering of such hatred prompts Irene to try to keep her at a distance. (Irene later admits to having overlooked the relentless and furious self-control that such a constant performance costs Clare.) Yet once Clare takes the step of self-liberation—at least part time, out of John’s sight—she can’t and won’t stop, and Irene is powerless to get in the way of what she knows to be a disaster in the making. Hall’s greatest directorial inspiration is her portrayal of Irene, who, for all her bustling activity, is passive in her own way—and who, for all her relentless observation, is caught in tangles of passion. In the movie as in the novel, Irene is the story’s main character, its central consciousness, even if it’s Clare whose actions give rise to the central drama. Hall follows Irene throughout, and much of what Hall shows Irene doing is watching, looking, gazing, staring, pondering. The very heart of the movie “Passing” is in Thompson’s eyes, and, as Thompson brings a vast expressive range and emotional energy to her gaze, Hall works a wide variety of changes on the theme. She films Thompson in varied, vigorous, and probing closeups. She offers point-of-view shots in which other characters stare, seemingly into the camera, at Irene. She fills the movie with mirrors and finds Irene unable to escape her own gaze in them, let alone the gazes of others as they turn up alongside her in the reflections. Above all, Hall shows Irene watching with mounting anguish as events in which she is inextricably involved speed toward their inevitable conclusion—and as she is bumped outside herself, watching her own inability to take action on behalf of her friend.

“Passing” is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness. Her finely textured, tensely poised compositions, filmed in black-and-white, render the drama of desperate desires and unspoken emotions in high and fervent relief. In sharply detailed yet allusive abstractions, Hall turns the Harlem of the nineteen-twenties into a stage of grand philosophical tragedy. Irene’s own reflections, both mental and visual, are joined to quietly imposing depictions of city life, including broodingly expressive views of the staccato rhythms of brownstone architecture and a series of tracking shots (on the Harlem street leading Irene and other characters to the Redfields’ town house) that recur onscreen like a musical motif. There’s also a literal musical motif, piano music composed and performed by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, that Hall uses to accompany yet another striking, recurring visual figure: sunlight seen through the leaves of trees on the Redfields’ street, a sort of cinematic harmony of culture and nature, of aesthetics and experience, that stands throughout as an artistic and political ideal.

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