Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga grapple with race and perception in the melodramatic Passing
Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of the Nella Larsen novel hits Netflix next month
Film Reviews Passing
It’s still kind of amazing that, in the early 20th century, mixed-race, light-skinned Black women could often get away with being seen (or “passing”) as white. The late novelist Nella Larsen knew a thing or two about that—her father was Afro-Caribbean, her mother Danish—and the only books she wrote, 1928’s Quicksand and 1929’s Passing, extensively dealt with the subject.
Pale-faced actress Rebecca Hall (whose mother is biracial) has now taken it upon herself to both write and direct an adaptation of the latter book, which will hit theaters for a couple weeks before permanently landing a spot on Netflix. And she’s secured two of Hollywood’s most acclaimed, light-skinned ladies, Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, to star in the lead roles.
Thompson plays Irene, a Harlem socialite who has a nice family life with her doctor husband (Moonlight’s Andre Holland) and two boys. While shopping uptown, she runs into Clare (Negga), an old childhood friend. Irene finds out that her ol’ chum is living her life as a full-fledged white woman, married to a casually racist white dude (Alexander Skarsgård, of course!) who has no idea his wife is a sista.
As much as Irene would like to forget the awkward run-in, the lonely Clare slips back into her life, visiting Irene (or “Reenie,” as Clare calls her) at her home and eventually accompanying her and her husband to swanky get-togethers in Harlem. At first, Irene welcomes her with open arms, especially when it seems her former friend wants to get some color back in her life. But jealousy eventually creeps in, as Clare wins over Irene’s family, friends, even her maid. Irene begins to quietly simmer with envy and contempt, as she once again finds herself competing with someone way lighter than her.
For her debut feature, Hall makes sure everything that’s captured on screen is appropriate with the times, right down to the black-and-white imagery, the 4:3 full-frame aspect ratio, and a melancholy, tickled-ivory jazz score from the experimental artist Devonté Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange). As for the story itself, it often moves with a moody, morbid vagueness that makes the film seem like a Gothic ghost story, except that everyone’s alive.
Thompson is all prim and proper fear and self-loathing as Irene, a woman who doesn’t want to deal with race… in 1920s Harlem! Even when one of her boys gets called the dreaded N-word, race and racism is something she’d prefer not to discuss—as opposed to her husband, who is all too ready to tell his sons about the latest lynching in the South. (Holland is all straight-shooter in this, playing his upper-class doctor as a man who’s fully aware he’s still a you-know-what to white folks.) Irene doesn’t even want to acknowledge that she herself could also pass for white; in the opening shopping scenes, the white people around her are surprisingly at ease. Negga winds up playing the more sympathetic character of the two, as Clare quietly reacquaints herself with her Blackness at every Harlem soirée she attends.
All of this makes Passing seem more like a maudlin melodrama than a study of Harlem Renaissance-era racial tension. Of course, the movie does acknowledge it was (and still is) an everyday struggle for anyone whose skin isn’t white—even for those pretending to be white. But since the story is more about Irene and her quiet, paranoid rivalry with Clare, the drama can be awkward and soapy. You also get the sense that Hall is a bit too sheepish to delve into the plusses and minuses of being a Black woman who could pass for white. In the end, Passing lacks the boldness of something like “Illusions,” the classic 1982 short from Daughters Of The Dust director Julie Dash, in which Lonette McKee infiltrates WWII–era Hollywood by passing as a white studio assistant.
Eventually, Passing reaches a tragic, very snowy climax for our heroines. It’s quite the perplexing finale for a movie that is, on a whole, mostly perplexing. You could say Hall is continuing in Larsen’s footsteps and showing how the lives of biracial people can often be plagued with confusion. Throughout her film, both Irene and Clare present themselves as women who often wonder if they’ve sided with the right tribe. As Passing not-so-subtly implies, even though it gives you lighter skin pigment (and less problematic hair), being mixed-race isn’t as exotic as it’s been made out to be.
42 Comments
I’ve nothing but raves for this elsewhere, can’t wait to check it out. Wish Ruth Negga was in more stuff.. haven’t seen her in anything since Loving.
She was the absolute business in Preacher.
And relatively-little-known fact: she’s the voice of the Emerald Herald in Dark Souls II.
Yeah! And another Marvel alum, Hannah John-Kamen, found herself in Dark Souls 1 as (Lord’s Blade Ciaran) and Dark Souls 2 (Sweet Shalquoir). It’s fun that a few bigger name British actresses played in dubs of several Japanese games – Jenna Coleman did one of the main roles in Xenoblade Chronicles.
I hope you didnt just call Ruth Negga British!
Sadly I did, apologies to Ruth Negga :C
She’s great no matter what the role is. She was loads of fun as a campy Marvel villain, too.
Always interested in this subject since my gg-grandfather ‘changed races’ during the American Civil War so my branch of the family is ‘white’ while his siblings branches are ‘black’.
Didn’t find this out until I was in my 50s, but it did help to explain why my mom’s family was so twisted. Hiding who you are is never pleasant.
Although things being as they were/are, I can’t say that I blame him.
This review seemed oddly glib at points.
I wonder if the adaptation excised the novel’s homoerotic undertones or if the reviewer just…failed to notice.
Yeah I read the novel in college and was sort of surprised by how overt it was for the time period.
yeah, the contrast between the coolness of Irene’s marriage to Brian and the intensity of her obsession with Clare is a lot.
The film definitely retains the lesbian subtext. Which is one the reasons I enjoyed the movie more than the reviewer, I think—because there is so much going on that it’s hard to dismiss it as a simplistic morality play. Though I do understand why some people seem perplexed by the film, since it’s more interested in presenting differing perspectives and raising a myriad of questions than in making any sort of definitive statement.In fact, though I haven’t read the original novel, I did just quickly read the ending, and it seems like the film may actually be more equivocal than the novel was. Obviously, I’m going by a quick read-through of just the last few pages, but it seems like the implication there is (to be a bit vague) that a certain character may have secretly been responsible for the story’s dramatic final turn. Whereas I took the film’s ending to be suggesting that one of three characters could have been responsible for that final turn.
The book is very 1920s – thematically rich and not subtle about it. It’s a great feature of literature before the mid 20th century.
Came into ask this. I wasn’t that bright (no guarantee about now either) when I read it in a class about Lesbian and Gay studies even—but this trailer feels drenched in it. It’s the most intriguing part of the trailer to me.
The sexuality stuff is pretty damn overt in the movie. The reviewer definitely failed to notice. One of the best things about the movie is how “Passing” covers not just race but class and sexuality, among other things.
In conclusion, “being mixed-race isn’t as exotic as it’s been made out to be.”It may be a victim of established house styles, but I frequently felt I was reading a ‘Watch This’ instead of a ‘Review.’
yeah can i read a review written by someone who doesnt already hate the story? i love this book very very very much (yes im a white passing black male, but you dont have to be to love this book!)
The movie’s really good – it’s engrossing, the characters are all painfully human and flawed, it never hits you over the head with “THIS IS THE POINT”. Lovely, layered, and engrossing film.
The line about it being tough to pass as black is darkly amusing after Rachel Dolezal and the similar stories of people successfully doing just that.The stories about these passing families are wholly tragic (both in the sense that they felt they had to hide their heritage, and how it usually sundered the inconvenient family ties who would expose the truth.) I love the look of this film; they’ve done a great job exposing Negga where she very much looks like other mixed stars of the era who successfully threaded the needle to build their careers.
Not even going to negatives, like Rachel Dolezal. There’s a book called Black Like Me that a white journalist wrote about trying to pass as black in the south, to see what it was like.spoiler alert he didn’t enjoy it
And then there’s the time Lois Lane did it.
Yea— and Eddie Murphy did a parody of that on SNL called White Like Me. We read Black Like Me in elementary school. Been fascinated ever since how easy or not it might be to put on other identities. Dressing as a woman. SPeaking FLuent Spanish in Mexico City. And– every Bisexual does this shit everyday.
My mom’s family is very light skinned, there are a range of passing stories. My grandparents both passed at particular times to get particular jobs (my grandma worked as a shipyard welder during WWII, at a shipyard that was only hiring whites, for example) but lived Black most of the time, even waging civil rights struggles. But many branches broke off and passed, my Aunt told me a funny story about finding out a white girl in her class was her cousin, and no one talked about it. Just saying this to say, it’s not always a Hollywood tragedy, for some light skinned folks it was just another tool for survival. Agree that it’s a fascinating, very American phenomena.
It’s not exclusive to america at all though
this is a legitimately funny scene from a movie I’ve always been led to believe was one of the all time worst!
All time worst? I split my sides watching this movie!It has definitely been forgotten, though, and it seems to play second-fiddle to other Pryor-Wilder team-ups.
All time worst? Is it really seen that way? I have nothing but love for this movie.
That is pretty damn funny.“There are a lot of adjustments that are going to have to be made! I’ll have to cancel the swimming lessons!”
“Does Dad know?”
One of my all-time favorite movies and this scene is awesome. His poor sister.
Bill Camp is in this? I’m in
I’m looking forward to seeing this. The book felt like an overlooked classic when I read it in school.
I have trouble seeing Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson as ‘passing’, especially back in the goddamned 1920s—Rashida Jones and Meghan Markle could definitely pass, lightskinned biracial Blacks like Thompson and Negga just have lightskin privilege.
It’s still kind of amazing that, in the early 20th century, mixed-race, light-skinned Black women could often get away with being seen (or “passing”) as white….Is it though? There are plenty of modern examples of people profiting from the public’s confusion about their ethnic identities. Look at women like Ariana Grande, Iggy Azalea, or Rita Ora. It’s not like you can identify someone’s entire genetic history based on appearance alone, and that was even more true in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before photo IDs were a thing.
My mother was extremely light skinned with Caucasian features, and came from an upper class black family in Minneapolis. Cotillions, her own car, a good job as a bank clerk while she finished her teaching degree- a very nice life.Then she married my dad and moved down to Omaha. Omaha in the early sixties was _not_ a good place to be any color darker than pink. Segregation, Jim Crow, all of that. The thing is? She could have passed. Easily. And no one would have thought differently. She refused. Point of honor. Which would- I certainly think- would have had her reacting negatively to women who _did_ pass. Nope. A lot of the people in her social circle, black ladies, were extremely negative about and toward people who passed. She was… she understood. I often wonder whether or not she was tempted. I think she had to have been. First time she was spat upon, or given shitty service.But no. Resolute.
My great-grandmother got great jobs (for a woman of the day) because she was passing. She had green eyes, blonde highlights and was 5’11”. Her father was White and her mother already lighter than most Black women. When my grand father was born, he was declared White on his birth certificate which got him all the way through the AirForce and up to the CIA. He would chuckle reminiscing how he fooled his superiors by keeping his hair short and speaking with less bass in his voice.
“It’s still kind of amazing that, in the early 20th century, mixed-race, light-skinned Black women could often get away with being seen (or “passing”) as white.”
Is it more or less amazing that some light-skinned people STILL DO THIS a fifth of the way through the 21st centruy?
My wife nailed the problem with Passing as soon as she saw the trailer: Ruth Negga doesn’t look white. The other might be that Rebecca Hall is.
Just saw the movie, and it feels like the reviewer went in not wanting to like the movie, something I rarely say. But the review is so glib and has zero desire to engage with the movie, otherwise it would also note the film’s handling of sexuality, class, and just the overall dissatisfaction of a “contented” life – the way this film portrays boredom, among other things, is wonderful.I will say I was really enraptured by the movie in theaters. It sounds like the reviewer might’ve watched at home while checking his phone, which would explain this pretty superficial reading of the movie. Describing the end, and the movie as a whole, as “perplexing” is pretty perplexing, otherwise.