Review: Hard Truths

Image courtesy of Bleecker Street Media.

Pansy is angry. An aging wife and mother, she often finds herself venting to anyone who will willingly – or more often, not – listen about mostly everything. Occasionally, her anger is righteous – for instance, an incident involving a brazen man who demands that she move out of the parking spot in which she is taking a moment for herself – but more often than not, it’s way out of proportion.

So, she finds herself shouting at supermarket workers, dentists, doctors, employees at furniture stores, her husband, her son, her well-meaning sister, pretty much everyone.

Why is Pansy so angry, her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), asks during a Mother’s Day visit to the gravesite of their mother, a moment that should have been a somber one, but instead resorts in the typical releasing of Pansy’s vitriol. Why can’t she enjoy life? “I don’t know,” Pansy answers in frustration.

Portrayed by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Pansy is one of the year’s most intriguing characters in one of 2024’s finest and deceptively complex performances. This is Jean-Baptiste’s first role in a Mike Leigh film since his phenomenal “Secrets and Lies,” a Palm d’Or winner that represents the best of British cinema from the past three decades.

But while Jean-Baptiste’s work in that film was of a quiet nature, Pansy is a force of nature. Much like Sally Hawkins in “Happy Go Lucky,” David Thewlis in “Naked” or Brenda Blethyn in “Secrets and Lies,” Pansy dominates every scene she’s in and everyone else merely revolves around her as planets circling a seething, burning sun.

If “Happy Go Lucky” was Leigh’s story of an overly pleasant person – albeit one whose happiness was, perhaps, an intentional mask worn to survive a difficult world – then his latest is a story of an overly unpleasant one. That’s not to say that Pansy isn’t a sympathetic character. Clearly, she’s hurting and the concept that “hurt people hurt people” is clearly at play here.

Just as we never quite knew what was going on under the surface with Hawkins in “Happy Go Lucky,” it’s never quite spelled out what makes Pansy so upset. She claims she doesn’t feel well, but can’t exactly put her finger on what ails her. She has little patience for her husband, a quiet handyman named Curtley (David Webber), or her son, a hulking and mostly silent 22-year-old named Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who lives at home and seemingly has no ambitions.

Pansy spends most of her days vigorously cleaning her home, when she’s not complaining about the service she receives at furniture stores, dentist’s and doctor’s offices, or supermarkets. Scenes vacillate between being laugh-out-loud funny and awkward during her tirades. During one at the dinner table, she goes from attacking charity workers outside of stores to racist police within a few breaths.

At the cemetery, a visit planned by her sister that acts as a sort of centerpiece for the story, it is hinted that Pansy bore the brunt of the pressure from their single mother, while Chantelle – a single mother and hairdresser who seemingly has a joyful life at home with her two grown daughters – felt less of the burden. It was Pansy who discovered their mother’s body at the time of her death.

Throughout the course of the film, we watch as the other characters suffer from workplace indignities, health issues, or various annoyances. Moses is picked upon due to his size by two young men on the street. Curtley suffers a back injury at work. Aleisha (Sophia Brown), one of Chantelle’s daughters, has a massive amount of work dumped on her at her job, while a work-related research project completed by her sister, Kayla (Ani Nelson), is condescendingly dismissed by her boss, despite it being obvious how much work she put into it.

All of these characters suffer their problems in silence. Pansy, on the other hand, can’t let the smallest thing go. She is willing to die on every hill. And, the film seems to suggest, while this may have to do with past traumas, it could very well be because living in the world in this day and age is – let’s be honest – a lot. People are difficult. Work is difficult. Everyday life is difficult. The societal fabric seems to be tearing. The fact that most of us manage to compose ourselves on a daily basis seems like a small miracle.

“Hard Truths” is the best film by Leigh in about a decade. Rightfully considered England’s greatest living filmmaker, his body of work includes such classics as “Secrets and Lies,” “Happy Go Lucky,” “Naked,” “Life is Sweet,” “Another Year,” and “Mr. Turner,” but also a great second tier of pictures that includes “Topsy-Turvy,” “Vera Drake,” and “Career Girls.” His latest, much like “Happy Go Lucky,” is a great film about an outsized personality whose foibles may often provoke a laugh, if only to cover up the pain inside.