NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Hard Truths is another spare but emotionally piercing study of working-class families from pioneering filmmaker Mike Leigh. It is a movie of great turmoil but also of great human connection, a portrait of Black middle-class life in contemporary Britain that’s also a portrait of a particular woman who is so unpleasant she pulls everyone into her vortex of misery.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as the ironically named Pansy, and it’s a performance of such ferocity and volatility that you feel it in your guts. Pansy is unsettled from the movie’s very first scene: We’re introduced to her as she startles herself awake and immediately sets to cleaning her already immaculate house, which resembles one of those generic model homes.
Pansy is irritable, angry, flat-out mean. Nothing passes her muster. She yells at strangers in the grocery store, in parking lots, on the street. She complains about chronic pain, but she won’t let her doctors get through a routine exam. She escalates every interaction until the other person is yelling back at her, and then she either complains about their reaction or runs away from it.
Her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, seems to have given up. He stares off into the middle distance as Pansy unloads her litany of daily grievances. She’s always chiding her adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for being messy and for still living at home, and he has disassociated to such a degree that he mostly shuffles around the neighborhood.
But Leigh is not content to merely present us with a catalog of miseries. In stark contrast to Pansy is her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), who has warm relationships with the clients at her salon and with her two grown daughters. Most directors would zero in on Pansy’s rage and stay there; Leigh puts just as much dramatic weight to the other characters’ mundanity, and he gives us glimpses into all their daily lives.
As is typical of his work, we don’t quite know what Hard Truths is building to, if anything at all. It’s about an hour in that somebody finally asks Pansy, “Why are you so angry all the time?” and the tenor of the movie—and the character—makes an abrupt heel turn. We understand her a bit more, but we’re still left wondering if there’s more to Pansy’s obvious despair, and whether she’ll ever get out of it.
Jean-Baptiste, whose breakout was in Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies, is simply remarkable as Pansy. It’s a high-wire performance, because she’s so awful for so long that it takes us by surprise when we find ourselves caring for her. But this is typical of Leigh, who famously develops his screenplays in collaboration with his actors and who often tests our patience with seemingly cartoonish dolts before revealing the true depths of their souls.
That makes him perhaps the most unflaggingly empathetic filmmaker we have, and Hard Truths is one of the best and most wrenching films he has made. His movies are like magic tricks, his modest, reserved style a deft sleight of hand.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.