Review of Hard Truths (d. Mike Leigh, 2024)
Early on in Mike Leigh’s new film Hard Truths, a family of three sits down for supper. Seated in the center of the frame is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the family matriarch, and she is flanked by her sullen husband Curtley (David Webber) to her right and shiftless twentysomething son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) to her left. Pansy—a dyspeptic, harried soul, played with astonishing ferocity by Jean-Baptiste—is too preoccupied to eat. She’s had a bad day—she has a lot of those—and launched into another tirade. “Cheerful, grinning people—can’t stand ‘em,” she says, Curtley and Moses chewing silently so as not to incur her wrath. This is clearly the learned behavior of two people who’ve become accustomed to Pansy’s bludgeoning invective; the viewer will also develop their own strategies to cope with Pansy’s pugnacity, if not quite understand it. This being a Leigh film, one is to laugh: Pansy’s takedowns of social politesse are often scabrously funny, none more than in her bemusement regarding the attire of their neighbor’s infant (which she refers to as “that fat baby”). “What’s a baby got pockets for?” she snarls, a moment of observational comedy worthy of Larry David. But just as Curtley and Moses seem to not know how to mollify Pansy’s rage—what to do with the problems she poses for both her family and herself—you also get the sense that Leigh doesn’t either.
The essential mysteriousness of Pansy’s condition is crucial to Hard Truths’ construction, which is light on plot. Instead, we get many variations on a theme: how two siblings can grow up to lead vastly different lives. On one hand, Pansy’s life is defined by a festering resentment between her and Curtley, Moses and most of the outside world. On the other, her sister Chantelle (a radiant Michele Austin), a hairdresser and single mother sharing a flat with two adult children of her own (played by Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown, respectively), leads a life as genial as Pansy’s is sterile. Leigh highlights this through set design: Pansy, often armed with a bottle of all-purpose cleaner in one hand and a roll of paper towels in the other, keeps a spotless home, while Chantelle’s cluttered apartment opens up to a balcony overflowing with potted greenery and filling the interior with natural light.
It’s not that Chantelle and her daughters don’t have problems of their own; we see all three have setbacks both personal and professional that they each take in stride. Compare that to Pansy, whose explosions both public and private belie a growing sense of isolation (in a moment both heartbreaking and telling, she declares, while choking back tears and surrounded by family, “I’m so lonely”) that has stranded Curtley in a loveless marriage and weighs heavily on Moses, who appears to have neither friends nor realistic professional prospects. A mid-film visit to their mother’s grave suggests an undercarriage of grief at least partially informs Pansy’s deep-seated defensiveness. Still, the nature of her unceasing despair remains vague; when an exasperated Chantelle asks Pansy why she cannot enjoy life, Pansy rancorously bellows back, “I don’t know!”
Echoes of Leigh’s previous work reverberate throughout Hard Truths. Pansy alternately scans as a one-(wo)man wrecking crew à la Johnny in Naked (1993) and as the morose yang to Poppy’s mirthful yin in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). The film Hard Truths most directly recalls, though, is 1996’s Secrets & Lies, which featured both Jean-Baptiste and Austin, the latter in her first-ever film appearance. Yet the undeniable power of Hard Truths is often muted for many of the same reasons that Secrets & Lies fails to convince. While many critics have contrasted Jean-Baptiste’s performance in Hard Truths to her soulful, reticent work as Hortense in Secrets & Lies, a more pointed comparison could be made between Pansy and Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia, Hortense’s fragile biological mother and initially reluctant confidante. She, too, held the center of a script that put her in beleaguered opposition to her family and was defined by a delivery simultaneously charming and grating. Both characters also have a key moment of vulnerability at a family gathering—a public leveling of the facades they have constructed around themselves out of self-preservation—conveyed through wheezing laughter that dissolves into tears.
It’s the sort of gesture that casts Leigh’s tragicomic sensibilities in precise relief. It’s also a showcase for the exacting talent of his formidable lead actors, who always have a major hand in the shaping of Leigh’s films. This influence is typically discussed in relation to the seeming improvisational nature of such moments: it’s the lingua franca of Leigh’s kitchen sink realism. Yet it also illuminates Leigh’s unfortunate reliance on contrivances. As in Secrets & Lies, Hard Truths’ complexities are derived almost entirely from the breadth of the ensemble, not any one character’s depth of characterization. Despite strong performances across the board, the fixity of their individual traits reduces many of their characterizations to archetypes and Leigh’s script to schematic repetition: the viewer simply waits for Pansy to excoriate another victim, to hammer another nail firmly into the ground.
Leigh lets these archetypes run into each other, and you have to give him credit as a sort of blunt force trauma-dramatist: he knows how to stage a devastating confrontation between a rock and a hard place. But this structure is subject to diminishing returns, as none of Leigh’s characters seem to meaningfully change, least of all Pansy. She remains as inconsolably indignant as Cynthia remained breathlessly histrionic. Both start to feel less like real people and more like narrative devices, and the script’s further detours into both women’s pain and subsequent floundering feels less exploratory than exploitative. As an artistic creation, Pansy was born to suffer; the lack of explanation behind her anguish—which so many critics find one of the film’s most devastating details—feels less true to the haunting mysteries of why we end up the way we do and more to the demands of Leigh’s airtight dramaturgy.
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Reviewed 1/24/2025