Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London. It’s also a tough watch.
By Jackson Weaver
I asked a group of film-lovers a question recently: what’s a movie you adored but never, ever want to watch again?
The responses, and the reasoning behind them, were fairly unsurprising. Requiem for a Dream, Come and See, Midsommar: powerful stories whose exploration of the extremes of human cruelty and suffering leave you strung out, squirming, taut and exhausted. And, most importantly, with no particular itch to return.
With Hard Truths, we may have another title for the pile. It’s a surprising addition given the subject matter — no war crimes, flyblown corpses or sewn-up bear carcasses are to be found in writer-director Mike Leigh’s newest effort. Instead, it’s an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London.
There’s Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), the stay-at-home adult son whose hidden life only rarely opens to show glimpses of repressed passion (a preoccupation with planes, pilots and all things flying) and suppressed rage (a middle finger pointed at a closed door).
There’s the father, Curtley (David Webber), a sad-eyed professional tradesman who spends more time being talked at by his surrogate work-son than talking with his actual offspring. There’s the gregarious but grieving aunt; the bubbly cousin stymied at work; and our central character, the mother, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).
Pansy is immured in a fortress of bitterness she can’t help but reinforce. She’s a scowling serial complainer, the kind of dependably cruel customer who prompts senior retail workers to tap new hires on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take this one.”
Difficult character study
Pansy complains about never being invited to events, and complains when she’s asked to go. She furiously scrubs and cleans every inch of her home and body, then sleeps through the day out of exhaustion brought on by myriad non-specific health concerns.
She screams in wild terror when woken, reared-up and walleyed like a cornered animal — though why she would feel cornered in her aggressively beige, suburban home isn’t immediately clear. It’s not until she screams at a similarly cornered animal in her backyard — a terrified fox looking for a way out of the trap it willingly walked into — that the film’s conceit starts to crystallize. In both cases, they are backing away from Pansy’s husband.
As a character study, Hard Truths is painfully good. It might be the most accurate portrayal of borderline personality disorder ever put on screen, and could become as well-known for depicting that condition as No Country for Old Men is for representing psychopathy. In fact, Hard Truths ruminates so incessantly and incisively on the type of person whose irrational fear of abandonment leads to emotional explosions that it could find use as a shorthand. Instead of lengthy pamphlets or uncomfortable conversations, worried relatives could ask: “Just curious, have you seen Hard Truths?”
If it sounds sparse in terms of story, that’s because it is. Other than Pansy and her sister planning and re-planning a visit to their mother’s grave, Hard Truths is hard up for a plot. It instead rests on the power of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, and the authenticity of the backgrounds she and her surrounding cast represent.
The first, as a woman trapped in a domestic nightmare of her own making, is relentlessly compelling. Jean-Baptiste puts in the tireless work of bringing Pansy to life; not only as a curmudgeon, but one so ensnared by her patterns she can’t pull back from them — even as she watches them destroy her.
