Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths reunites the legendary British auteur with actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who received an Oscar nod for his searing 1996 drama Secrets and Lies, in which she played the accomplished adult daughter of a downtrodden mother who gave her up at birth. That mother, indelibly played by Brenda Blethyn, was a middle-aged ball of nerves and disillusionment. Nearly three decades later, Hard Truths gives Jean-Baptiste a similar Leigh creation—that of any embittered Londoner in a state of 24/7 peak aggression—and the actress gives the year’s finest performance on film.
By now it’s common knowledge that Leigh, one of cinema’s greatest chroniclers of working class anti-heroes in pictures such as Naked, Happy Go Lucky, All of Nothing and Another Year, uses improvisation to develop his characters and screenplays. And in Hard Truths, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste have birthed one of his most complicated characters, a raging wife and mother for whom every waking hour is marked by anxiety. While she may be the sort of “difficult” creation that can sometimes alienate a movie audience (we’d likely steer clear in daily life), Jean-Baptiste’s performance is the definition of the acting big leagues.
For Pansy Deacon (Jean-Baptiste), life is a series of disappointments and admonishments, and like her life, Leigh’s picture is a real challenge, mostly in asking the audience to bear a misanthrope who wakes up screaming each day from a nightmare that won’t abate. While we’re not privy to the nature of her dreams, her reality is even more difficult. Her life in her sterile and overly ordered London outskirts home is finite and contained; even the idea of opening the sliding door to the manicured backyard is fraught with anxiety and fear that a dreaded fox might be on the loose.
Pansy and her long-suffering plumber husband Curtley (David Webber, sublime) live with their withdrawn, young adult son, Moses (Twain Barrett), a source of tremendous disappointment for Pansy, who fumes at his every move, quick to brand him a failure. Curtley seems resigned to being reviled, their marriage a struggle to be endured.
For Pansy, life is a series of brutal shout-downs, confronting anyone in her field of view. An ordinary day finds her at odds with a sofa saleswoman, customers on line at the local grocer, parking lot drivers and a substitute dentist, one of the few who won’t tolerate her abuse. The origin of her rage isn’t yet clear, but her tirades are viciously venomous (and frequently very funny). Every innocent interaction is cause for complaint, most of which are imagined slights.
On the other side of town Patsy has a sister named Chantelle, played with gregarious warmth by Michelle Austin, who is the opposite of her frustrated sibling as a happy-go-lucky hairdresser and single mother to a pair of twenty-something nieces (Sophia Brown, Ani Nelson) who are budding professionals. The family contrast is strikingly observed, between ordered coldness and lived-in love.
Chatelle tolerates Patsy’s dismissiveness, insisting that the pair visit their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, Patsy unloading a torrent grief over discovering the matriarch dead and resentments about being her caregiver. Yet are these painful memories sufficient to account for her clear emotional imbalance? Late in the film, Leigh delivers one of those sequences he does so well—a strained, Mother’s Day ensemble gathering for a family where Patsy almost has a breakthrough, Jean-Baptiste wordlessly unlocking a torrent of long-buried sorrow.
Throughout Hard Truths—a curious title suggesting revelations to be laid bare—Leigh diagrams a tale of two sisters who may have largely been raised together but whose lives took a striking divergence of temperament. While what exactly is afflicting Pansy won’t be made explicit, she clearly is emotionally closed down beneath acidic armor, a woman in a self-imposed exile of loneliness. She’d never admit this, of course, because it would mean a total obliteration of her defensively constructed self.
This is serious business, and the depth of Pansy’s pain isn’t going to be solved by third-act screenwriting catharsis. Leigh doesn’t give pat reconciliation or uplift, and in the film’s final scene—a simple juxtaposition of two people in pain, in opposite rooms—he provides little relief. Despite the film seeming to move toward Pansy’s self-awareness, it instead doubles down, and the sobering conclusion makes clear the impact of anger and self-destruction on the livelihood of a marriage.
All of this makes Hard Truths sound like an unpleasant experience, but both Leigh and Jean-Baptiste find empathy in Pansy’s pathos and Jean-Baptiste is so entertainingly scathing in her verbal tirades that you simply can’t help but admire the centrifugal force of both the performance and character. Jean-Baptiste gives Pansy such intimidating authority (and, sometimes, cruelly gallows black humor) that she all but pulls everyone into her black hole.
Hard Truths’ screenplay is plainspoken, direct and realistic; for some, whether such observance minus uplift is the stuff of satisfying drama will be another matter. But it’s marvelous to see Leigh back in the territory that he’s mined so remarkably in his modern variations on the “kitchen sink” relationship drama (though his compatriot Ken Loach is closer to the fore of social issues). Like Lesley Manville in Leigh’s heartbreaking Another Year, Jean-Baptiste takes a person that most would like to write off, or tell off, and asks us to simply accept someone carrying around the immense weight of unseen wounds.
Highly recommended.
3 1/2 stars
