Two in Black and White for 2021

Passing is pretty good. It has no score, though, and that causes a lot of problems for the filmmaking. Rebecca Hall's movie wants to be a kind of thriller, I think. I realized near the end of act three that we were in a kind of serious psychological study slash thriller with Tessa Thompson's Irene character as someone whose motives and ideas we aren't supposed to be able quite to figure out. And I think I would have liked a film that really tried to do this, but Passing doesn't have the music it needs to help it with this, and so what we have instead is a series of scenes that move the whole thing forward but don't ever give the film the drive it needs. Something haunting, something insistent, something a little frantic, even something vaguely horrific like the score for Pablo Larraín's Spencer would have given Passing a much better pace. If it had had this, I think Passing would have worked. As it is, it rather doesn't.

I also don't really think Tessa Thompson is a very good actress. She's beautiful, obviously, but I never feel like she lets me know what's going on with her – or maybe not much is. Contrasted with the fantastic, almost hysterical performance that Ruth Negga gives, Thompson barely even registers. Ruth Negga is brilliant in Passing. She absolutely tears into the part of Clare and lets us see absolutely everything she's going through. It's wonderful, gorgeous work.

One thing I loved about Passing was the way the film took care to illuminate the queer aspects of Nella Larson's novel. In this film, Irene has a powerful and strange attraction to Clare that even she doesn't quite understand, and I loved that Hall's film did this.

Belfast is a better movie than Passing, but in many ways it has its problems, too. Kenneth Branagh's film is about a small boy as the Troubles start in Northern Ireland and he reappraises his relationship with his father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather, who is dying. The film – like Passing – is given to us in black and white, but it has a kind of gimmick related to color. When little Buddy watches anything on stage or on screen, it's in color. (Well, not all of what they watch is in color. High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are, as they were originally, in monochrome.) 

But Belfast has another, more important, gimmick – one that is even more theatrical than switching to color photography. In this film, we only are allowed to see things that little Buddy overhears or is in the room for. So, even though the movie is really about Buddy's mother and father and their relationship, we never see anything that Buddy himself isn't present for in some sort of way. The film takes great pains to indicate this by placing Buddy in the shot during scenes that don't really concern him or otherwise including him in the scene. This makes everything in Belfast seem performed, as if everyone is doing everything they're doing for little Buddy. It's an odd little quirk in the movie, and I didn't think it totally worked. After awhile it makes everything feel just a little too heightened, as if the film won't let me watch it without seeing through Buddy's eyes. He's not exactly trustworthy after all; he's a small boy.

But the fucking acting in Belfast is incredible. Honestly, I think all four of the main actors in the movie deserve Oscar nominations. Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan are Buddy's mom and dad, and they're both just incredible. I had no idea Jamie Dornan could do this level of work. His performance is devastating. I loved him. Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds are also always good, but here their work feels special and intricate. Their performances are nuanced and beautiful and idiosyncratic even if the roles aren't very large. The film is just beautifully, beautifully acted, and it's worth seeing simply for that.