Hard Truths

Mike Leigh reunites with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the co-star of perhaps his most acclaimed film, Secrets and Lies (1996), to craft a picture that plays almost like the inverse of his 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky. Jean-Baptiste, who scored a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe nominations for her role as a cheerful, kind, optimistic Black Londoner who seeks out her white birth mother in Secrets and Lies, takes on a radically different lead role in Hard Truths. In what is easily one of the year's best performances, Jean-Baptiste brings to life Pansy Deacon, an angry, depressed, antisocial woman who criticizes, blames, or picks a fight with every person she comes into contact with. While you wouldn't want to wait on this woman or get into an altercation with her in your car, it's Pansy's family who must absorb the brunt of her tirades. This predicament is most acute for those family members she lives with: her husband Curtley (David Webber), a submissive plumber, and her aimless overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), a grown man still living at home whom she berates incessantly for his lack of ambition.

The ferocity, force, and seeming inexhaustibility of Pansy's verbal abuse is slightly reminiscent of David Thewlis's lead turn in Leigh's Naked (1993), which won Best Actor and Best Director at Cannes. Like Naked, this is a dark movie that is also quite funny, with the characters' pain masked by their almost comically relentless aggression and verbal dexterity. But Pansy's internal suffering is much easier to spot than Thewlis's aggressive Johnny in Naked. Her deep psychological wounds come across as instantaneously as the internal core of kindness and acceptance possessed by Sally Hawkins's Poppy Cross in Happy-Go-Lucky. In fact, Hard Truth almost plays like an alternate version of that film if it had centered on the harsh, cynical, bigoted driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan instead of Hawkins' determinedly sunny protagonist.

Pansy's sister, a hairdresser named Chantelle (Michele Austin), is much more of a Happy-Go-Lucky type. She's had to endure her older sister's tirades for a long time, though perhaps much more in recent years than in their younger times. Though she doesn't make excuses for Pansy, Chantelle tries like hell to understand what accident of birth, or birth order, rendered her sister so apoplectic while she is so contented. Things come to a head as the fifth anniversary of their mother's death approaches, but the expected explosive family gathering climax doesn't unfold in the ways we might expect it to.

Hard Truths is a brilliant character study without much of a film built around it. Perhaps at 81 years old, Leigh has less stamina for generating a complex story via his lengthy pre-scripting process in which he and his actors build the characters and narrative out of observation and improvisation. In all of this filmmaker's best work—I'd list his stand-out features and TV films, but honestly, they all stand out to one degree or another—a central figure typically dominates the screen. Still, part of what makes those characters fascinating is how the other people in their lives react to them. Patsy is such a bombastic individual that the people in her life have practically shut down in response to the blunt force of a personality that leaves no room for anyone else's reality. That is not to say the supporting cast here doesn't create the kind of authentic, lived-in characters we expect in a Leigh picture; we just don't get to see them do very much except keep their heads down and try not to antagonize Patsy anymore than they already have by merely existing in space with her.

Yet Leigh and Jean-Baptiste render Patsy so compellingly that we want to keep watching her out of a desire to understand what's happening beneath her hostile exterior. Austin, who was also featured in Leigh's Secrets & Lies and Another Year, creates the character who tries the hardest to get past Patsy's armor. Chantelle clearly feels for her sister and tries to look past all the vitriol to see the human being inside. It's more than I could do, and the compassion on display in this character is inspiring. But Hard Truths, which ends on a deliberately unsatisfying and ambiguous note, is ultimately less successful across the board than most of Leigh's other work. The protagonist overwhelms this picture to such a degree that it starts to feel like there isn't a lived-in world beyond her, despite the brief and bland glimpses we're given of one. The film's visual look also makes this feature film feel like a disposable BBC TV program—not a drama, but more like the flat, generic video look of a cooking show or real estate program. It's depressing that this is the final film shot by the great British cinematographer Dick Pope, who lensed most of Leigh's movies, as well as Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun, Douglas McGrath's Nicholas Nickleby, John Sayles' Honeydripper, Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles and Bernie, and many other visually stunning pictures. Hard Truths is a triumph for its star but feels like a lesser work in the careers of most of the other participating artists.