An Unmatched Film — “Passing”

There are films where a laugh can be a dagger meant for the audience, where what happens between characters takes place as much in the unsettled places in your soul as it does on the screen. There are films so precise in their complexity, with so much to say in so little a time, that they give it to you all at once as neatly as could be so that they can take days afterward unspooling in you. There are films that make you feel like you can’t take as deep a breath as you might need because the air’s let out through all the doors they’ve opened. There is Rebecca Hall’s “Passing”.

It’s 1929, midday. Irene is in a hotel dining room, wary someone might register she’s Black and doesn’t ‘belong’. Clare recognizes Irene and introduces herself. They used to go to school together. Clare is passing. Her husband thinks she’s white; everyone around her thinks she’s white. He mistakes Irene as white as well.

We’ll see Irene go back to Harlem, with a husband Brian and children who couldn’t pass as white. She’ll forget the encounter, for a time. To say anything more would be too much.

What I will say is that “Passing” has more tension loaded into its dialogue, its lingering black-and-white cinematography, its tightly wound editing, than just about any other film could dream. Wherever you think that initial premise would go only scrapes the surface. Whatever ideas you think “Passing” may engage, it spirals through so many intersecting layers – through race, feminism, socioeconomics, all without ever feeling like the film is anything other than a portal into the lives of characters who feel vitally real and consequential.

Tessa Thompson as Irene and Ruth Negga as Clare give spellbinding performances that wind and wind until you’re very unsure who either really is, deep down as a person. There is so much suggestion, so much intimation in “Passing”. No word or look is wasted. A phrase might feel like a fever dream, a smile like an obscuring fog, a silence like an anchor, and yet it all comes together so naturally. “Passing” is described as a drama, but it conveys emotionally as a thriller, an old-fashioned one that requires and rewards patience.

The story in “Passing” is lean and tautly told, while the gestures of it feel like staring into the abyss and having no idea where to start measuring. If it feels like I’m being too poetic here or not pinning down what “Passing” is, it’s because it doesn’t feel like it has a limit, and something needs a limit to be described in full. If “Passing” has a limit, I haven’t reached it.

All this may make “Passing” sound experimental, and in some ways it treads there, but it’s hardly uncontained. It’s so tightly delivered, so compactly told, with no frills, not a wasted motion in sight, that it feels like a poem you can read in a minute and spend the rest of your life turning over. It contains in such an identifiable, digestible form a flood of meanings and evocations.

There’s an article rattling around in me that speaks to part of what “Passing” engages, from a Latino standpoint and context. That’s different from a Black-led conversation and context, but there are elements that are mirrored or shared. That article would tell you about the ways that whiteness can pervade. It would tell you about friends who married someone white and confessed that they breathed a sigh of relief when their children came out with light skin, when they knew their children could pass enough to dodge the bulk of abuse and violence they had known, and when they recognized the second after thinking this how completely and terrifyingly they had learned to practice the violence of racism within themselves, to hate what they are, to do the work of chasing out what little survives to make us who we are, to do the work of colonization and racism so ingrained in us that it’s half-done before racists even lift a finger. We do that work for free, willingly, echoing terror against ourselves, lessons drilled in across generations.

The number of people who have told me this makes me glad I don’t have children, makes me relieved I lack a part of my life I’ve always wanted. Look how that history of racism makes us happy to hate ourselves, that article would say. Look how they make us relieved to chase out anything that isn’t a copy of them, a begging plea to be accepted if we just commit that act of violence to self-mutilate our own image, our own value, our own uniqueness, to chase it out of mind, to eradicate it from our story.

That’s a lifetime of work to undo, and while it’s this subtle violence at the heart of “Passing”, it’s just one of many subtle violences the film speaks to, just one of the unfathomable, immeasurable violences that loom where we choose not to see them, and that “Passing” stares straight into. When a laugh feels like a dagger meant for the audience, you can’t help but wonder what it sees in you.

There are those pieces of art, those poems and paintings, those books, those films, those games that each build a house in who we are, that give us a comfort as we stare at that abyss of work knowing we’ll never see its end ourselves – there are those pieces of art that we know will accompany us from here on out. Whatever they see is something we desperately need to feel is shared, is recognized by others. It’s art that stores a piece of meaning in us, and in which we store a piece of ourselves. It opens doors in you that sometimes get jammed shut, that you need a piece of art to shake, to loose, to burst through.

I’ve said before that if you show me a perfect film, I’ll show you one that could have been more ambitious, more willing to be less than perfect in order to tackle more. I stand corrected.

You can watch “Passing” on Netflix.

If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to write articles like this one.

The Utter Brilliance of “Selma”

Rarely on film does one searing, early moment so completely define everything else that follows. To understand Selma is to face that moment, just as to be a part of that time was to endure it. I won’t spoil it, but you’ll know it when it happens. It is jaw-dropping, it is crucial, and it obtains its power because it really occurred.

Selma follows Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader and pastor who led the 1965 march of African-Americans and allies from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The march, a demonstration intended to realize for African-Americans the right to vote, faced violence that captured the nation.

But didn’t African-Americans already have the right to vote? Technically, yes, but not effectively. Impossible tasks were placed before them. Pay poll taxes for every year they were unregistered, require registered voters to vouch for you, recite the names of 60 specific elected officials at the drop of a hat, each of these obstacles more unconstitutional than the last.

Selma doesn’t feel like a biographical movie as much as it feels like a war film. This isn’t because it’s filled with violence. There are moments of brutality, but it’s of the sort that’s tempered by history, that feels important to witness but isn’t overstated because no filmmaker can equal the true violence captured on archive footage.

Selma feels like a war film because it follows the strategies each side employs to achieve their goals. Dr. King makes one move, Alabama governor George Wallace makes another, President Lyndon B. Johnson makes yet another. It realizes the architecture and strategy behind protest better than any film I can remember. In helping audiences to better understand the language of protest, director Ava DuVernay connects the film to the very fractured United States we live in today.

It also finds the humanity struggling inside these characters, the strengths and weaknesses they couldn’t help but bring with them to a violent time. Selma is a poetic film, a film that speaks the language of faith to invoke the spirit of it, that imbues the entire experience of witnessing what happened with that faith. It helps you understand what guided men and women through a time when fear could have easily turned them back. It is not just a film about civil rights, it is a film about what moves people toward their purpose.

Yet it is all framed by one early, searing moment that clearly defines what that purpose must be.

I can’t imagine a more important film this year. Selma will be considered and should earn a bevy of awards, including a strong showing at the Oscars.

Many biographical movies seek to style reality, to give it a sleeker look and make everything happen in a removed cinematic universe where everyone mutters in shadows. Instead, Selma is visually smart without being visually dense. It is accessible and says what it has to say with a minimum of extra complication.

David Oyelowo’s portrayal of Dr. King isn’t remarkable in its drama, but rather for its restraint. He feels like a real person I could picture walking into a room, sitting down with, learning something from. The rest of the ensemble is remarkable. Even the smallest roles are filled with conviction and feeling.

There’s been some criticism over Tom Wilkinson’s portrayal of President Johnson, particular in regard to his use of the FBI to spy on Dr. King. I’ll address this for my Texas audience: LBJ did those things. That’s a matter of historical record. I still view LBJ as a great leader, but even legends make mistakes and sometimes trust the wrong people. Selma itself discusses the mistakes that Dr. King made as well, both in his personal life and in his early civil rights leadership. To say that one great man is allowed to be examined, flaws and all, without allowing the other to be examined through the same lens is hypocritical. I won’t say Wilkinson gets the accent down, but he does get the personality, and watching him chew out Wallace is one of the true joys in this film.

It’s not a movie about President Johnson, though, and that’s important to remember. It’s a movie about the leaders, the people, and the spirit of a place that became a battleground for one of the most important moments of the 20th century.

Selma isn’t interested in the celebrity or idolization of any of its figures. It’s interested in what they did, why they chose to do it, and the fears, joys, and faith they felt in lifting that burden.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Selma have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King is played by Carmen Ejogo. She captures some of the film’s most powerful moments and messages.

Oprah Winfrey plays Annie Lee Cooper. Tessa Thompson plays Diane Nash, an incredibly important yet often forgotten leader in the civil rights movement. Lorraine Toussaint plays civil rights figure Amelia Boynton, Charity Jordan plays Viola Lee Jackson, and Tara Ochs plays Viola Liuzzo, a role with few lines but that you won’t be forgetting any time soon. The film is filled out with several other female characters.

One cannot look at this moment in history and pretend women were not as big a part of it as men.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Yes.

3. About something other than a man?

Yes. Women speak about voting rights, plan the march, and discuss African-American history in the film’s most overwhelmingly poetic and culturally communicative moment.

You know what? There’s not really much for me to say here. Selma gets it pretty right. It’s a film that can’t help but focus on male leaders – Dr. King, President Johnson, and Governor Wallace – but remembers that women were just as central to this movement.

Personally, I’d love to have seen more of Diane Nash. She had co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and in may ways created the blueprint of modern nonviolent protest. While the film does treat her as part of Dr. King’s inner circle, it doesn’t exactly make clear just how important and experienced a leader she was. It does this to certain male figures as well, so it doesn’t feel biased.

It’s a minor quibble – Selma already strikes a fine balance of invoking a moving experience and teaching the historical context in which it happened to both men and women – but if you’d like to learn more about a woman who doesn’t get the due she deserves this and this are good places to start.