After taking some lengthy (and, if I’m to be honest, very boring) trips to the past for his last couple of films in the form of Mr Turner and Peterloo, Mike Leigh is finally back where he truly shines with Hard Truths, chronicling the lives of a dysfunctional lower-middle-class family. The result is possibly his best film since 1996’s Secrets and Lies, reuniting him nearly 30 years with that entry’s star Marianne Jean-Baptiste for a magnificent tale of a profoundly complicated middle-aged woman whose entire life seems to be a protracted mental breakdown. A premise that could be insufferable in the wrong hands, here Leigh and Jean-Baptiste turn it into one of the year’s funniest, most moving, and most genuinely *real* movies.
Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman clearly suffering from a litany of anxiety and depressive disorders and can’t help but take her pain out on the world, horrible to all people all the time. Her husband Curtley (David Webber) both hates her and takes her for granted, while her shiftless adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) has been beaten down by his mother’s constant berating, mostly silent and with very few interests beyond just eating. Obviously, Pansy is awful, but Leigh and Jean-Baptiste find so many notes within this that she remains compelling and hilarious, even (somehow) sympathetic at times.
It’s the result of stupendously good dialogue and an absolute powerhouse performance – you can always see the fear and regret behind Pansy’s eyes even as she’s in the middle of some fight or another, and Leigh, in a rare but perfect choice for a ‘nasty protagonist’ film, allows his supporting characters to bite back in some very funny ways. Layers of depth really start getting added, though, when we meet Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who both loves and is baffled by her older sibling.
Chantelle and her two adult daughters (each with a high-flying but somewhat unsatisfying job) are rays of light, constantly laughing with one another and approaching life with an optimism that seems positively alien in Pansy’s household, which is pretty and clean but mostly devoid of love and life, even getting less sunshine than Chantelle’s flat. Here, Leigh teases out a backstory of a pushy, difficult mother who never thought Pansy was good enough, and whose corpse Pansy discovered five years prior to this story, a trauma that weighs on her in a profoundly damaging way.
Leigh tells us all this in his typical naturalistic manner, all exposition contained within conversations that feel entirely real and lived-in – you really believe these characters, especially Pansy and Chantelle, have a past and future beyond what we’re shown here, an insight into their lives both fascinating and wrenching. Pansy allows herself few feelings beyond anger and fear, but the brief moments in which Chantelle or Moses are able to unlock her (Curtley has long given up on doing so, if he ever even tried in the first place) are deeply affecting.
On top of this textual empathy, Leigh also frames his characters with an irresistible love. No matter the emotions on display, his cast’s faces fill his frames, rich and luminous against a lovely bright colour palette that gives this very grounded story a ‘realer than real’ feeling. As a very specific slice of London life, Hard Truths couldn’t really get any more convincing, Leigh resisting any temptation to ‘fix’ these characters in the 90-or-so minutes that we’re allowed to know them for. It’s an honest portrait of people both simple and difficult, all so well-realised that, by the end, they feel as familiar as family.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 