A finely realized look at blurred racial lines

 

Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing takes a clear-eyed look at a delicate racial issue. Set in the 1920s, Passing focuses on two women who had been teenage friends but haven't seen each other for years. Tessa Thompson plays Irene, a Black woman living a middle-class life in Harlem with her physician husband (Andre Holland). Clare (Ruth Negga) is a light-completed woman who has been passing for white. She’s married to a racist banker (Alexander Skarsgard) who, of course, has no idea that his wife is Black. The two women reunite accidentally in cafe in a New York hotel where Irene is trying to escape the heat. After the meeting,  Clare begins to discover that she’s tired of posing. She wants to rekindle the spark of Black life that promises to release her from stultification. Filming in black-and-white and employing an old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, Rebecca Hall makes her directorial debut with a carefully calibrated (but never lifeless) depiction of a world that’s vanished but still relevant.  The movie gains in complexity as Clare begins to spend more time with Irene and her family. The actors are asked to convey a host of subtleties and ironies and they more than rise to the occasion. Passing leaves us with much to unpack: the constraints of propriety on the Black bourgeoisie, the longing not only for equality but of freedom of cultural expression, questions about the images that people construct to insulate themselves from harsh truths. An ambiguous ending may frustrate some viewers, but Passing approaches a host of volatile subjects with nuance, delicacy, and some of the year's most beautifully realized performances. Available on Netflix and in some theaters.

A revealing search for identity

Tender and tough, Moonlight stays with you.

To understand Chiron, the main character in director Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, it might be helpful to understand what this young man -- shown at three different stages of his life and played by three different actors -- doesn't have.

No father guides Chiron; his crack-addicted, single mom offers no real parental support; no group of friends provides companionship; and no protector helps keep the neighborhood bullies at bay.

Such observations make Chiron sound like a sociological statistic, a black kid suffering the deprivations of an impoverished life in Miami's ironically named Liberty City. Although Chiron's deprivations constitute a valid and appropriate description, they don't go far enough.

The most important thing that Chiron lacks is a voice. What makes Jenkins's movie impressive are the ways in which he has coaxed the actors who play Chiron to be expressive without articulating the myriad contradictory feelings that whirl inside the character's head. Chiron seldom speaks.

You can (and probably should) spend time unpacking the various complex meanings in Jenkins's movie: the drug dealer who becomes a genuine father figure in Chiron's life but who, because he sells drugs to Chiron's mother, is pained by his own hypocrisy; Chiron's discovery of his gayness; or the multiplicity of causes leading to the violent explosion that criminalizes Chiron and redirects his life.

All of those things are worth discussing, but Chiron's voicelessness underlies everything worth thinking about in Moonlight.

And by voice, I don't mean only the act of speaking. I mean Chiron's ability to define an identity that's unshackled from environment and circumstance.

In the movie's first section, we meet the youngest version of Chiron, as played by Alex Hibbert. A slight kid who has been issued the nickname "Little," Chiron clearly is an outsider.

In this section, Chiron encounters Juan (a terrific Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who takes the boy under wing.

Born in Cuba, Juan sincerely cares about Chiron. Scenes in which he teaches Chiron to swim give Jenkins an opportunity to display a tender, lovely touch.

Not surprisingly, Juan's concerns land him in a territorial fight with Chiron's mother, a walking fury of woman portrayed by Naomie Harris.

When Chiron reaches his teen years, Ashton Sanders takes over the role. Of the three actors who portray Chiron, Sanders has the least physical resemblance to the others, but his acting leaves no doubt about the adolescent Chiron's connection to his boyhood self: his watchfulness, his ability to ask penetrating questions, his loneliness.

In this period, Chiron has his first sexual experience, and again tries to escape bullies. He hides from his tormentors until an irrepressible anger breaks through his muted surface.

Trevante Rhodes takes over the role when Chiron becomes an adult. By this time, Chiron has survived a stint in juvenile prison; he has bulked up, perhaps to armor himself against the world and against his own feelings. He's also living a life that mirrors the life lived by Juan.

I don't know if it's acting or physical resemblance or a combination of the two, but as this segment evolves, Rhodes reveals more and more traces of the Chiron we knew as a child.

Eventually, Chiron reconnects with a friend from childhood (Andre Holland), a reunion that leads to the movie's conclusion -- which feels like a well-earned respite from all the previous tensions, if not a triumphant moment of self-realization.

Whether you see Moonlight as a perfect movie or not, it's difficult to imagine that you won't be moved by the way Jenkins interprets and reimagines Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

It's not easy to make a movie in which the main character is less actor than one who's acted upon, less talker than one who is talked at, but Jenkins creates a richly realized world and moves us through it with insight and small moments of grace.

A racial drama misses the mark

A white grandfather fights for custody of his black granddaughter.

In Black or White, Kevin Costner plays Elliot Anderson, a successful Los Angeles attorney whose 17-year-old daughter died during childbirth. The child's father, a drug-addicted black man, took no responsibility for his daughter, so Elliot and his wife raised young Eloise.

But when Elliot's wife dies in a car crash, the girl's paternal grandmother (Octavia Spencer) proposes that she share custody with Elliot. He rejects what seems like a perfectly reasonable offer.

Her son may be wayward, but Spencer's Rowena appears to be entirely responsible. She cares for her nieces and nephews, presides over a happy household and runs a successful real estate business.

Despite the fact that he's drinking too much and dealing with grief, Elliot finds himself in the middle of a custody fight that dominates what becomes an increasingly unconvincing look at the divide separating an affluent LA lawyer his scrappy opponent.

The problem: Black or White doesn't delve deeply enough into the characters who are upholding different sides of this custody fight.

The movie also stacks the deck against Eloise's father (Andre Holland), a troubled young man who turns up about half way through the movie, claiming that he's reformed.

Holland's Reggie is so obviously ill-prepared for fatherhood that the movie never gives him a chance. He tries to extort money from Elliot, and winds up in a late-picture confrontation that's neither believable nor fair.

Costner does a good job portraying alcoholic denial and the unexpressed anger Elliot harbors about his wife's death, but he's stuck in a scenario that goes where most second-rate dramas land, the courtroom.

There, writer/director Michael Binder cooks up a strategy in which Rowena's brother -- an attorney played by Anthony Mackie -- tries to convince the presiding judge that Elliot's a racist with a bad drinking problem.

Perhaps to keep us from losing sympathy for Elliot, he's portrayed as a somewhat responsible drunk. Elliot hires an unwaveringly earnest math tutor (Opho Koaho) for Eloise. Elliot also asks the young man to double as a driver when he's too inebriated to get behind the wheel himself, which is most of the time.

Black or White doesn't spend enough time with Rowena to make us understand what she wants for Eloise, and it never allows her to articulate a reasonable argument about why a black child needs to be exposed to other blacks.

Elliot seems to be living an all-white life.

The movie tilts that way, too. Black or White spends entirely too much time with Costner as it leads us toward a finale in which one side essentially gives up.

Too often, Black or White misses the opportunity to explore the gray areas that could have shed real and productive light on an interesting problem. The movie concludes as if it has resolved its issues. I'm not sure, though, that it ever really tackled them.