Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is the angriest woman in the world, ranting and raging against anything and everything that happens to cross her path.
In the opening minutes of Hard Truths, she chides her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) for taking a walk (because it’ll be seen as “loitering with intent”) and leaving a banana peel on the kitchen counter (“I’m not your servant”), as well as rails against people asking for charity donations (“cheerful grinning people—I can’t stand them!”), a stranger who was walking a dog in a coat (“it’s cruelty to animals!”), and a “fat baby” whose parents put a bow on her head to indicate that she’s a girl—“like I care!”
With a sour puss permanently affixed to her face, she’s an individual at constant war, and in Mike Leigh’s latest film, her fury comes across as a hilarious joke—until, that is, it doesn’t.
Leigh’s first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste since 1996’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies, Hard Truths—which showed at this year’s New York Film Festival ahead of its Dec. 6 awards qualifying release; it opens wide Jan. 10—is a tale of working-class agony, much (if not all) of which is felt by Pansy.
A homemaker who spends her days and nights fanatically cleaning her home, avoiding her backyard (due to its pigeons, critters, and general filth), and badmouthing Moses as a no-good layabout and her husband Curtley (David Webber) as a useless thorn in her side, Pansy has more grievances than Great Britain has pubs, and at every turn, she proves incapable of keeping them to herself.
At the grocery store, she gets into a shouting match with those behind her in the checkout line while lashing out at the impassive clerk. (“Look at you—fix your face!). At the doctor’s office, she’s enraged when she doesn’t get to see her usual physician, and responds hostility to every request. And at the dentist, she yelps at the slightest touch, causing the appointment to abruptly end.
Jean-Baptiste doesn’t sugarcoat Pansy’s antagonism nor cast it in comedic terms; her protagonist is a tormented soul who finds every comment, action, and reaction to be a source of intolerable unpleasantness and idiocy. Hard Truths depicts her as a figure of titanic unhappiness, and juxtaposes her with her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser and single mother to adult daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown).
Unlike her sibling, Chantelle is patient and friendly with her customers and her children, with whom she laughs and jokes about their nights out and her fondness for dancing. Nonetheless, Chantelle isn’t immune from sorrow, as evidenced by her desire to visit the grave of her mom on the five-year anniversary of her death, which this year happens to fall on Mother’s Day.
Chantelle invites Pansy and her brood to join her at the cemetery and, afterwards, at her flat for a family gathering, but as with all things, Pansy refuses to commit with unbelievable rudeness. Hard Truths doesn’t overtly explicate the origins of Pansy’s misery, instead merely focusing on its main character as she fumes her way into further isolation.
She’s detached from her grown son, whose life consists of walks in the city by himself and playing flight-simulator video games in his room (his headphones always on), and her husband who, when not working as a plumber with partner Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone), suffers his spouse’s wrath with weary resignation, their stony glares at each other indicating the chasm between them. She’s a vehement whirlwind, albeit one whose ire is clearly rooted in deep, corrosive anguish.
As is Leigh’s trademark, Hard Truths is formally unassuming and yet poised and powerful, his gentle pans, tender close-ups, and astute compositions conveying the alienation wrought by Pansy’s endless outbursts. Set to sparse, plaintive strings and woodwinds, the film observes Pansy with fascination and empathy, even as it denies us an easy explanation for her troubles.
While hand-holding exposition is nowhere to be found, clues about her discontent are scattered throughout the proceedings, most notably during her and Chantelle’s visit to their mom’s grave, where Pansy is compelled not to eulogize but to criticize in a manner that suggests a lifetime’s worth of bitterness that, having been swallowed for so many years, has corrupted her heart and mind.
Pain is a constant in Hard Truths, and not solely for Pansy. Moses is picked on by bullies, Kayla endures a nasty rejection from her cosmetics-company boss, Aleisha learns that she’s made a significant error at her law firm, and Curtley is ultimately injured on the job, rendering him more or less incapacitated.
Still, if Leigh’s film is a study of sadness, it’s also an inquiry into the possibility of joy and togetherness in a world that throws one obstacle after another in people’s way. Pansy’s story is that of a drowning woman in desperate need of a life preserver, and during her Mother’s Day visit with Chantelle, she appears close to grabbing ahold of one. Uninterested in positing easy or comforting resolutions, however, the writer/director ultimately implies that finding shelter from the storm is achievable and yet far from guaranteed for those intent on remaining in their own (internal and external) tempests.
Hard Truths is at once funny and heartbreaking, hopeful and despairing, all thanks to Jean-Baptiste, whose performance is a knotty, hilarious, and excruciating tour-de-force.
Laying bare Pansy’s resentment with such intensity that it’s impossible not to cringe in anticipation before her every utterance, the actress is at once scary and pathetic, not to mention eternally on edge, to the point that she doesn’t wake from sleep (her favorite depression-fostered pastime) so much as leap out of bed with a livid, frantic scream. Jean-Baptiste portrays Pansy as someone who not only can’t hold onto a measure of peace but doesn’t know where to look for it, and her procession of quarrels and tirades come across as both expressions of her distress and distraught cries for help.
Ultimately, the truths of Hard Truths are as simple and poignant as they are difficult to initially discern. An unmistakable certainty, though, is that this reunion of Leigh and Jean-Baptiste was too long in the making—and should be repeated once again post haste.
