Movie Review: Passing (2021)

A drama about race and belonging, Passing adopts an ethereal touch but has only a slight story to tell.

In New York City of the 1920s, two light-skinned Black women meet for the first time since their childhood days in Chicago. Irene (Tessa Thompson) lives in Harlem and is married to Dr. Brian Redfield (André Holland). Clare (Ruth Negga) has lived her entire adult life pretending to be white, and is now married to self-proclaimed racist John Bellew (Alexander Skarsgård). On the day they meet, Irene is also passing as white in Manhattan, and John does not notice.

The always lively Clare pretends to be happy, but she is actually miserable living her lie. She starts visiting Irene and John at their Harlem home, and befriends their two boys. She also joins their social circuit, attending parties and club events where white liberal New Yorkers including author Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp) mingle with Blacks. Irene's jealousy bubbles up when she notices Brian is happiest when Clare is around.

The directorial debut of Rebecca Hall, who also wrote the screenplay, Passing adapts the 1929 book by Nella Larsen with an intriguing sense of style. The wispy black and white cinematography, courtesy of Eduard Grau, lyrically blurs the lines between race, identity, and culture. And within the era-appropriate boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio, either the background or foreground are allowed to fade out of focus, Hall toying with mixtures of clarity and concealment in the same frame.

Unfortunately, the content does not live up to the packaging. The overarching theme settles on obvious lies we tell ourselves in the quest for happiness. Irene carries the familiar burden of middle class wife and mother, alternating between being satisfied and arguing with Brian about upbringing and uprooting. Doubts about her marriage's stability barely evolve. Meanwhile Clare has spent her life smiling too much and trying too hard to deny who she is, and the weight of lies is starting to push down on her fake vivaciousness. She may be more expressive about the hurt she has caused, but the Clare of the final act is more resigned than enlightened.

As the narrative plays on the same notes, most of the activity happens inside Irene's mind, as she wonders if she has made the right choices and whether Clare is a threat to avoid or a friend to embrace. The angles created but not exploited include a faint current of attraction between the two women, and upper-class white people satisfying hip urges by plugging into Black culture. With snippets replacing substance, the pacing is ponderous, and the film's 99 minutes drag on.

Both Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga are soulful in performances tugging at the edge of sorrow. André Holland provides Brian with world weariness as a father of two young boys, discerning with crystalline clarity the horror of America's race problem, and exasperated that others are oblivious.

Passing adopts breezy airiness as it waves at important topics, and just passes by without engaging.



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Movie Review: Ad Astra (2019)

A space adventure, Ad Astra mixes a father-son quest with a larger search-for-the-meaning-of-life, but fumbles both the science and the fiction.

In the near future, Earth is subjected to massive unexplained electrical storms. Perpetually calm and collected astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) barely survives a fall back to earth from the international antenna station. He is then recruited for a secret mission to travel to Mars and send a message to his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), a legendary but missing astronaut.

A generation earlier Clifford commanded the Lima Project on a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system to seek evidence of intelligent life. But he was believed dead 16 years ago when contact was lost with Lima near Neptune. Now he is presumed alive and responsible for the electrical storms. Roy arrives to Mars and sends the message to his father, but when he is prevented from reading the response, he embarks on an unsanctioned mission on the spaceship Cepheus to Neptune.

Directed and co-written by James Gray, Ad Astra looks beautiful but is heavily laden with soulful narration, psychology and philosophy, and all of it ultimately drifts towards frustrating purposelessness. Despite a suitably subdued Brad Pitt performance, the narrative disintegrates early, with fragments of plot points and characters introduced and abandoned to no effect.

The movie is caught in dissonance of its own making, mixing a human-scaled sense of downbeat realism with ridiculous cliffhanger moments. A rover chase on the surface of the moon may be relatively unique, but represents a lot of what is wrong with the script. Apparently pirates are roaming the moon, but their intentions are never discussed. Later Roy tangles with angry monkeys on an abandoned spacecraft, makes use of a water-filled underground pipe system on Mars, secretly clambers into a rocket at take-off through the engine compartment, uses a hatch as a makeshift shield against space debris to float through space, and perfectly times a nuclear explosion to propel his spacecraft to safety. None of these supposed highlights pass the logic test or meaningfully enhance the story.

The characters do not fare any better. Donald Sutherland is prominent early on as a sort of mission minder, but is unceremoniously dropped. Ruth Negga and Liv Tyler briefly float in and out of Roy's adventure. And Tommy Lee Jones bites into the Marlon Brando role from Apocalypse Now, but never gets to explain quite why  - or how - he was trying to destroy Earth all the way from Neptune.

At the heart of Roy's trip is a search to better understand his father. Ignoring the space setting and all the hardware, Ad Astra becomes a simple story of one man coming to terms with his father's depression and sense of personal failure. Even this narrative bumps against a truncated and unsatisfactory resolution. There may be many reasons to hijack a future space program, but resolving daddy issues should not be one of them.

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Movie Review: Loving (2016)

A historical biography, Loving is the story of the romance that resulted in a legal challenge on laws banning mixed-race marriage in Southern states.

It's the late 1950s in rural Virginia. In a small but diverse Caroline County community, bricklayer and car mechanic Richard Loving, (Joel Edgerton), who is white, is very much in love with Mildred (Ruth Negga), a local black woman. After she announces her pregnancy they get married in Washington DC and start planning to build a house. It does not take long for local sheriff Brooks (Marton Csokas) and his men to burst in at midnight and arrest Richard and Mildred for violating Virginia's law banning interracial marriage.

Judge Bazile (David Jensen) suspends their one year prison sentence on condition they leave the state for 25 years. They relocate to Washington DC, where the family grows to three kids. But the lure of home is strong and with the civil rights movement gaining momentum, Mildred writes to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, seeking his intervention. The case is referred to the American Civil Liberties Union, and lawyer Bernie Cohen (Nick Kroll) is appointed to investigate appeal options.

A story of a humble and simple couple who became the catalysts for historic change, Loving is as low key and understated as its reluctant protagonists. Director Jeff Nichols also wrote the script, and he adopts a suitably detached observer tone, avoiding any hint of speeches, moralizing or even condemnation. Nichols also resists the temptation to enter the courtroom for any longer than needed. Once their case makes it to Supreme Court Richard and Mildred decide to stay away, and Nichols respects their decision and avoids turning Loving into a courtroom drama.

The story only gains strengths from it rejection of grandstanding and labels of heroism or villainy. Richard is a lumbering man of few words, his brooding exterior hiding a sensitive soul deeply dedicated to Mildred. In a memorably minimalist performance Joel Edgerton often occupies the screen with awkward silence and uncomfortable shuffling.

Ruth Negga compensates with a soft smile, a home-grown glint in her eye and a more patient stance. Mildred is devoted to her roots, her community and her new husband and growing family. Always a misfit in urban Washington DC, it is Mildred who takes the initiative to write to Kennedy, and then agitates Richard into accepting meetings with the ACLU. She is also marginally more comfortable with the media and engages with the press to shine a light on their case. Michael Shannon has a one-scene appearance as a Life magazine photographer.

Loving finds tender beauty in the elegance of rural life, Richard and Mildred the products of a tight-knit community that has largely embraced diversity and moved past labels based on skin colour. As is often the case, seminal change traces back to the most humble of origins.

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