WHY REBECCA HALL’S FINE FILM DEBUT FAILS TO PASS
So well-crafted and visually stunning is Rebecca Hall’s new film, that one would never guess, that shot in mere weeks, on a shoestring budget, it is her directorial debut.
Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel “Passing”, it is a highly-personalized, counter-intuitive work. Quietly complex, its every element has been carefully calculated. In the black and white movie, sound, silence, light, dark, the camera’s confining format and the subtle distortion of its lens, each contribute to heightening all the tensions and conflicts of what unexpectedly seems to amount to a physiological thriller, one reminiscent of Hitchcock.
Circa 1930: Nella Larsen. Repeatedly mixed-race Larsen lamented her inability to pass
At the start there are a sequence of engaging shoes suggestive of “Strangers on a Train”. And, a falling cigarette, an endless staircase and a smashed teapot, foretelling a climatic fall, to a gruesome death, all seem to be straight out of “Vertigo”.
As in “Strangers on a Train” well shod feet figure prominently in “Passing”
These are not slavish references. But neither are they gratuitous either. Seeking to tell her own story, of mixed-race heritage, in her own way, Ms. Hall has done whatever she felt was required to capture her special vision. Deliberately filled with anachronisms, artfully mixing decor and fashion from the 1920’s-1940’s, Hall’s Harlem is not Nella Larsen’s long-ago home. Yet, thoughtfully curated and choreographed, lighted and scored with refinement, insightfully, “Passing” nevertheless, ends up looking like a collage of every James Van Der Zer photograph one has ever seen. It is an elegy to Black Harlem during all its golden ages.
What’s problematic though, is what’s been scuttled to achieve an aesthetic triumph. Larsen’s searing story of two fair skinned schoolmates, serendipitously reacquainted, of course, survives . So does the divergent trajectory their lives have taken during a dozen years spent out-of-touch.
Each is supposed to so physically resemble an Aryan type, that despite Black ancestry, they might readily “pass”, or masquerade, as White. One, Clare Bellew, brilliantly played by Ruth Negga, does choose to live as White. She’s married to a racist banker. They have a young daughter, but Clare dares not to risk having another child who might be born with dark skin or woolly hair that might betray her secret.
Her girlhood friend, Irene Redfield, is engagingly portrayed by Tessa Thompson. Seemingly, “Rennie”, could not have made a more dissimilar choice. As a young Harlem matron, wed to a dark-skinned Black physician, she says she has all she’s ever desired. For Dr. and Mrs. Redfield, with their two sons, in a time when just 400 African American New Yorkers owned the place where they lived, inhabit a brownstone house attended by a live-in maid. Just the same, yearning for Clare as almost everyone else in the film seems to, how happy is she, really?
Make no mistake, these women share a proscribed world where White ancestry has afforded each relative privilege and plenty. This place where passing and progress to become the first Black among Whites, is beautifully described by Margo Jefferson in her brilliant 2016 memoir “Negroland”. “Mistakes — bad manners, poor taste, an excess of high spirits — could put you, your parents, and your people at risk,” Ms. Jefferson insightfully relates of this realm where she says, “ we thought of ourselves as the Third Race”
Isabel Washington Powell and her sister Fredericka Carolyn “Fredi” Washington were Harlem actresses who each refused to pass in order to further their careers. Fredi Washington’s greatest movie role was in “Imitation of Life” adapted from the Fannie Hurst novel. In it she depicts Peola Johnson, a poor Black girl who looks White, but only finds heartache attempting to cross over. The photographs below show just how well suited Washington was to the role.
Although the entire cast of Passing acted their asses off, one thing, mostly, marred and undermined their every effort. It was not the few assorted unintended anachronisms that spoiled things in “Passing”. True enough, outside of a ships crew, to find a group with as many as two bearded young men in the 1920’s, was unusual indeed. Then, the residential Victorian staircase used to reach a top-floor apartment in Harlem’s famed neo-Classical Graham Court Apartments, for me, that was jarring too. Not as much perhaps, as knowing that prior to 1935, no African Americans were permitted to rent there. But in the service of art, each of these trivialities can be taken in stride.
In 1920’s America, beards were a decided rarity
A jarring staircase
No, fair skin aside, it’s how completely Black both lead characters in iPassing, look. That’s what defeats it for me. Notwithstanding first rate performances, the lead actresses remind one of the White actors in blackface who portrayed African Americans in “The Birth” of a Nation. At least they do, so far as convincingly representing Blacks, impersonating Whites, with confidence and conviction.
Told by a waiter downtown, “Sorry, we don’t serve Negros!”, Harlem “it-girl”, Blanche Dunn, responded brightly, “I don’t blame you! Now quickly, bring me a menu please!
Rebecca Hall sees things differently. A child of upper-class privilege herself, her mother, Maria Ewing, the celebrated opera singer, was born in 1950, in working-class Detroit. Hall’s grandparents, her mother’s father and mother, were an interracial couple. Essentially, Hall’s own mom passed, finding acclaim as an artist and respectability as the wife of the distinguished theatre director, Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall CBE.
Maria Ewing, Hall’s mother, the celebrated opera singer
Addressing my quandary at a Lincoln Center screening , Hall explained passing from her perspective: “Thank you for that question. There have already been films with White actors playing someone who’s passing. So I didn’t want to do that. Filming without color made everything abstracted to better reflect how much everyone, one way or another, is passing. Certainly, if you’re in a Black family and a member leaves and crosses the color line, you don’t ever see them as white, even if all the white people see it.” She stressed, adding, “If the actors seem Black to you, it puts the audience in that position of looking at them and going, ‘Oh no! Are they OK? Will they be discovered? Isn’t everyone seeing what I’m seeing?’ That’s the perspective that I wanted the audience to see it from.”
Rebecca Hall following Netflix Lincoln Center screening of “Passing”
Someone nearby me in the screening astutely noted: “Ruth Negga, she resembles Hall’s mom. That alone must have influenced her being cast…”
And it’s true. Negga does looks like Hall’s mom and like Nella Larsen too. Larsen, a librarian a writer and a nurse, was a mixed-race woman who showed great promise and gained notice, to end in obscurity. So that repeatedly she was to lament her inability to pass.
Clare and Rene at ease
What’s the worry? I’m an historian. Today we live in a world where many, particularly the young, learn more of what they know about history from films and TV, than from reading books. So I’m concerned about misperceptions about the past that can impact how we regard the present. With Queen Latifah, in “Chicago”, depicting the warden of women for the 1920’s Cook County Correctional System, how are many to know, that before quite late in the Twentieth Century, such an opportunity, for an African American, was an impossibility? With Rebecca Hall’s version of Clare and Rennie, seemingly, decidedly Black, yet still passing for White, most other Blacks can pass too. Right?
Perhaps someday none of this will matter and Black men and women might affect long straight blond hair or bleach their skin with impunity? Perhaps sometime, there will not be so many NBA stars and music moguls who prefer to marry White women or only date Black girls with light skin? Maybe then we might all pass as human, generous and loving?
Queen Latifah, in “Chicago”, passing as equal
