NYFF Review: Mike Leigh And Marianne Jean-Baptiste Deliver Hard-Hitting 'Hard Truths'

By Jason Adams | Film | October 8, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | October 8, 2024 |

If they start feeding Mike Leigh’s movies into the A.I. machines we’re majorly screwed, because there might be no director working today who’s been so deeply fascinated by and better understood the clashing complexities of human nature. To watch his movies is to watch a window—often ones rusted shut from years of neglect—open on ourselves. And sure enough his latest picture Hard Truths is another humanist masterclass—reuniting him with Secrets & Lies actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste (no slouch in the masterclass department herself) this is a movie that can make a single teardrop more powerful than a thousand C.G. storms. Blown away, I am.

A perfect companion piece to Leigh’s 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky—which saw Sally Hawkins play a woman named Poppy whose resolute sunniness drove everybody up the wall—in Hard Truths, we have Jean-Baptiste playing Pansy, a woman on the verge who could’ve made Poppy burst into flames with a single fiery glare. Walking through every day outlandishly furious at the world, Pansy can find no situation that isn’t rife with assholes out to get her. Getting a few groceries is like World War 3 for this woman.

And for a while this is all very funny—the first half of Hard Truths leans into the comedy of Pansy’s outbursts, having scream-fights in parking lots and going off at dinner about ridiculous babies with pockets. Something like the routine sight of an amorous couple getting a little too comfortable on a sofa in a furniture store might as well be a lit fuse—and she’s off! Tearing into total strangers like a rabid dog.

But they aren’t all total strangers—it becomes clear that Pansy’s cruelest barbs are reserved for the people closest to her. And as her anger wears on and on and on it stops being funny and it becomes deeply troubling, sad, scary. But Mike Leigh plots this turnabout with infinitesimal grace, so much so that you don’t even notice that you’ve stopped laughing and are suddenly horrified at what you’re witnessing. Pansy is a woman not at all well; completely out of control of her own emotions. And everyone around her is being dragged down the determined downward slope too, whether they like it or not.

Pansy’s husband Curtley (David Webber) is a plumber who spends as much time on the job as he can on the off-chance he might not be the target of Pansy’s recriminations every second of every day; similarly her twentysomething son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), still living at home, is so browbeaten he can barely leave his bedroom. He sometimes manages to go for mid-day walks to escape, wandering the streets aimlessly with no destination, but even there we see him getting bullied by neighbors for his weight and his depressed manner. Both men are cowed, near mute, tiptoeing around their home in sheer terror. But no tiptoe is quiet enough for Pansy.

Back in Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy’s cheerfulness had its own on-screen emotional opposite, with the main thrust of the film becoming about her scenes against her rage-filled driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan). And Leigh plays a similar trick here in Hard Truths—Pansy’s kind and generous sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a hairdresser with two daughters whose home is full of laughter and the comfortable clutter of life. Where Pansy’s home is scrubbed show-room clean, all whites and grays with rigid shelves of storage containers, Chantelle and her girls are joyful and sloppy—living, laughing, and loving if you will.

As Leigh and Jean-Baptiste plot out what’s made Pansy so furious at the world—without ever being didactic about any of it—we do come to understand that she hasn’t always been like this. For one, this is very much a story that explicitly exists in our here and now in the wake of the COVID pandemic. That, along with the death of Pansy’s mother, seems to’ve taken her neurotic personality on to the next level, and… well if you can’t empathize with losing at least some of your emotional wellness over these past several years then you are not the person writing this review. Personally I felt Pansy’s struggle all of the way to the depths of me.

The war going on behind Pansy’s eyes, as her words and actions grow increasingly erratic, seemingly slipping through even her own grasp, is detailed furiously by Jean-Baptiste’s virtuoso work. As we watch an actor of such magnificent power and range literally shut down in front of us, Pansy’s mounting hysteria switching to paralysis, it’s like slamming into a wall at top speed—everything is still there. Panic and laughter and desperation and rage. All at war with one another. Frozen but explosive. Simply put this is a monumental performance. Staggering. And delivered without moralizing by either Jean-Baptiste or Leigh—they do not judge, and us along with them. We are simply observers. Witnesses to the immolation.

The most cutting aspect of Hard Truths (as if that weren’t enough) is in its hard mapping outward of the reverberations of one person’s depression—we watch with bellies sinking as Pansy’s sadness infects her world like its own plague in miniature. And along with it, an echo chamber—how Pansy sees it happening and how that only makes it worse. Her spiral feeds itself, and the yawning stretching vacuum of emptiness within her creates its own gravitational pull. I have never felt more seen than I did watching Pansy sit like a silent storm cloud in the center of a lunchtime gathering with family, turning a perfectly nice afternoon into a dirge.

Hard Truths certainly lives up to its title—like most of Leigh’s work it’s not easy, looking ourselves so explicitly in the eye. But it’s nevertheless, also like all of Leigh’s work, an unforgettable experience. One that will change you across the span of its ninety-seven fleeting minutes. To see ourselves reflected so knowingly, so gracefully, so mournfully aware of the terrible stuff that makes us human, hard edge to edge—Mike Leigh’s cinema is life itself.