But Passing, in which she triumphs, is sheer folly.
Black History Month has passed without the movie Passing winning any of the season’s movie prizes, even though it seemed a perfect totem for the month’s tradition of outdated, segregated, politically motivated, self-congratulatory race consciousness. Passing is a dramatization of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, a staple of Harlem Renaissance literature, that British actress Rebecca Hall adapted and directed for all the Black History Month ironies mentioned above.
This is worth our attention because it seems that Hall miscalculated. Passing, though beloved by white liberal reviewers and film-culture gatekeepers (it was prominently featured at the recent New York Film Festival), couldn’t attract audiences despite the current Black Lives Matter vogue. Larsen’s subject — two black women (played by Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga) who pass for white in 1920s New York — discombobulates contemporary thinking about race and social identity.
The phenomenon of “passing” seems verboten this millennium when actual passing — as in the cases of Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, and Barack Obama — is celebrated as examples of “post-racial” color blindness and political opportunism. That Irene Redfield (Thompson) slips past Jim Crow restrictions for her own convenience, rather than out of necessity, feels alien to a culture unaccustomed to accepting the real feelings of social inferiority, a culture that so misunderstands the complexity of multiracial America’s “black” identity — and its exploitation — that public figures such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are insistently referred to as “black” despite being of various shades and hybrid backgrounds.
When Irene stumbles upon an old peer, Clare Kendry (Negga) who has succeeded in passing even to her white racist husband (Alexander Skarsgard), their reunion leads to further confusion — including fussily veiled homosexual suggestion — that makes the movie’s premise seem absurd.
The biggest obstacle is the fact that Thompson’s Negro features could never be believed as anything else, even momentarily. Hall’s serious miscasting goes beyond a boondoggle but suggests that the filmmaker is clueless about her story’s issues and the facts of social living. (Daryl F. Zanuck and Elia Kazan were more than canny when casting the Caucasian Jeanne Crain as black in 1949’s Pinky.)
Passing lost all credibility when Hall’s promotional campaign used the same specious race-baiting usually restrained until Black History Month’s officially sanctioned boasts and audacity. Hall, daughter of Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre legend Peter Hall, revealed her family’s mixed-race secrets to NPR, crediting the discovery to her appearance on PBS’s Finding Your Roots (thus she was ordained “black” by Henry Louis Gates).
As a debut director, Hall channeled her “journey” into cinematic pretense by filming in pretentious black-and-white, as if to brazenly broadcast her theme, but the photography is too high-contrasty to be expressive, and the echoey sound effects of distant trumpets and tinkling piano indicate psychological instability rather than jazz-age ambiance. The trailblazing 1949 drama Lost Boundaries was more authentic about a black family passing and then ultimately gaining pride; Hall’s artsiness suggests she knows nothing about being black or, especially, the American black bourgeois experience that constrains the social status of Irene and her doctor-husband (André Holland). Passing gets lost in Hall’s high-minded presumptions concerning racial and sexual self-realization. (The entire film might be a fantasy about lesbian propriety and self-censorship.)
But Hall’s folly is Ruth Negga’s triumph. While American-born Thompson loses her way speaking in unrecognizable hushed tones with clipped diction, Irish-Ethiopian actress Negga crafts the year’s most original characterization. She performs Clare wittily, evoking Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois, the classic example of a British actress performing the experience of American social pressure. Negga surpasses Hall’s assumptions about passing by actually doing it and making Clare’s psychological distress poignant — through Southern lilt and doleful eyes. It’s a conscientious way to approach the “tragic mulatto” character, the Hollywood stereotype that limits Rebecca Hall’s thinking. This might never occur to an American actress obsessed with fake authenticity and being PC. Negga’s genuine emotion transcends Passing and its almost total inauthenticity. Negga’s culture-wide disregard confirms the fatuousness of Black History Month and the silliness of this year’s award season.
