I run hot and cold with Mike Leigh’s films. If you’re not sucked into his world, the slow burn of his stories is gonna fell like agony pretty quickly. Hard Truths is one of the messier ones, landing on the positive side of things thanks to one of the great performances of the year. Mark +1 for the agoraphobic OCD crowd!
Leigh takes us to a benign, run of the mill suburban house. Inside is the brewing Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman regiment in her routines, militaristically so. Husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) do their best to be quiet and let her release the hurricane of anger inside of her, so long as they’re not the subject of that anger, when they run & hide. Pansy’s only other tie to the outside world is her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) and Chantele’s daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), getting ready to spend the anniversary of their mother’s death together, not exactly ideal for the fragile Pansy to have to add to her emotional concerns.
How do you make a movie about a detestable normal person watchable? Leigh does the best he can, but Hard Truths earns that title for the first half. Pansy’s monologues feel like vomit on society itself, as everyone who knows her is afraid to speak up and draw her ire. Leigh goes for lite laughs at Pansy’s attempts to interact with anyone outside her circle, which go as horribly as you’d expect. The worker’s politeness met with Pansy’s hostility is sitcom catnip across various stores, as onlookers all can’t believe what they’re watching. Marianne Jean-Baptiste throws herself into all this drama, playing it as big as possible so Leigh can get the great reaction shots of the other actors. It’s amusing at times, but the movie walks dangerously close to unwatchability a lot, with Baptiste doing just enough to make myself and the audience wonder “what’s up with this woman?”
All leading to the big anniversary dinner gathering. Turns out that Pansy’s whole abrasive persona is covering for a broken person, unable to control anything in her life anymore. The praise for Baptiste is earned in this section, as all that vitriol is replaced with quiet depression, revealing how lost and scared Pansy has become. Leigh wonderfully juxtaposes Pansy and her family with Chantelle and her two daughters; that trio has issues yes, but deals with them more openly and empathetically allowing them to deal with their pain and move on. Pansy’s depression has pushed Curley to his wit’s end, and poor Moses has become the walking embodiment of generational trauma, with zero self-confidence to stand up for himself. Leigh also knows there’s no easy fix for this: things might never get better, a bleak note to end on. But hey, what did we expect from a movie called Hard Truths. The performances, especially from Jean-Baptiste, keep this movie fascinating and watchable, as well as the rest of Hard Truths’s society, which suggests Pansy’s life is more of an outlier than the norm.
But what if it isn’t? Hard Truths at least will make you look inside yourself, and ask if you’re a Pansy. If you are, I pray you get the help you need, that your loved ones are strong enough so you don’t have to worry about them as you try to fix yourself, and that you hopefully find that your situation is fixable. And if you’re a Moses, I hope the world throws you a bone and you find some great people to remind you how you are loved and capable of loving. That’s it! Mr. Rogers is the answer!