Hard Truths
Writer: Mike Leigh
Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone
Setting up a protagonist as a comic battleax, then revealing them as sympathetic, is one of drama's hardest stunts to pull off. It requires finesse, from their actor as well as from their director, not to mention their writer, too.
Happily, the great Brit Mike Leigh wrote and directed his latest movie, Hard Truths, which means the feat is down to him and one other person: his lead actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since his sixth film, 1996's Secrets & Lies. That they succeed as a pair in making Jean-Baptiste's character, Pansy, human despite her monstrosity is remarkable; Pansy is a volcano in constant unrest. Any provocation, whether great or small, will cause an eruption of molten rancor and seething grievances. The world according to Pansy comprises nothing but nuisances and snubs, and as no one else cares enough to incinerate every perceived affront to her dignity, the job is left to her.
But people like Pansy don't mature in a vacuum. She is the product of her generational circumstances, which Leigh refrains from explicating. He chooses to delicately pepper his script with just enough detail to profile the maternal baggage she's carried from youth to adulthood. In kind, Jean-Baptiste uses quieter moments, where Pansy neither causes a scene nor dominates one, to suggest that once upon a time, Pansy could have learned how to communicate all her past hardships to her loved ones; she chose to lay them six feet under, and they've eroded her soul ever since.
Hard Truths is a rotating character portrait, where Leigh divides screen time between Pansy's family — her husband Curtley (David Webber), and their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) — and her sunny younger sister, Chantelle's (Michele Austin). More material is accorded to Pansy and Chantelle, of course, whose relationship with Chantelle's daughters Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), as well as their relationship to each other, may offer hints of what drives Pansy's animus. They're a lively, bubbly, happy bunch, a stark contrast with the taciturn air that Pansy shares with Curtley and Moses. Kayla and Aleisha have a bond Pansy and Chantelle perhaps didn't, or that they wish they could have had; likewise, Chantelle enjoys a bond with them that Pansy aches for with her own family, though she'd never say so aloud.
"I don't understand you, but I love you," Chantelle tells Pansy an hour into Hard Truths. They're visiting their mom's grave on Mother's Day, in a scene that's demonstrative of both the film's high acting caliber as well as Leigh's commitment to unobtrusive direction. He is shrewd and judicious with his cutting, and the placement of cinematographer Dick Pope's camera, which is so well considered that Leigh hardly needs to cut at all. That's what happens in films where the director thinks like a foreman: Concise storytelling sets a stage where the cast's presence feels natural, but their speech feels extemporaneous.
Hard Truth's sense of spontaneity gives Jean-Baptiste leeway to mine laughs out of Pansy's barbed explosions at, to name a few, a furniture salesperson, checkout clerks at the grocers, the covering doctor at her practitioner's office, and strangers seeking parking. Pansy is irascible and incorrigible. The movie mines humor out of her abrasive persona seemingly as a defense mechanism. But there's a secondary effect to Leigh and his secondary characters ceding Pansy space, too: Pansy tyrannizes Curtley, Moses, Chantelle, Kayla, and Aleisha as surely as Jean-Baptiste towers over Hard Truths' ensemble. The quiet work they do underneath the umbrella of her commanding performance is just as essential to Leigh's observations about the lingering effects of psychic scars; by saying little, they each affirm Pansy's fear that they hate her, and unwittingly carry on her legacy of inherited pain.
In that supporting capacity, Barrett shines as sullen Moses, whose indolent first impression actually provides strong evidence that the cycle Pansy has been stuck in most of her life is starting anew. It's the hardest truth of all in Hard Truths, and for that matter, in a body of work predicated on them: easing the sting of accumulated trauma takes more time than it does for the trauma to build in the first place.
