NYFF Review: ‘Hard Truths:’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste Towers In Mike Leigh’s Exceptional New Film

There are many people in this world who are angry, bitter and resentful.

We often tend to dismiss these humans as annoying cranks and complainers, envious of other’s successes who enjoy wallowing in their own misery instead of trying to improve their lives. But all these folks have their own stories, and the miraculous feat accomplished by filmmaker Mike Leigh in his exceptional new film Hard Truths is forcing the viewer into the world of one of those exasperated and exasperating beings and eliciting both empathy and sympathy from the viewer.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a perpetually vexed middle-aged woman, constantly cleaning her suburban home and endlessly ranting at her unmotivated, low-self-esteemed, 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and her uncommunicative plumber husband Curtley (David Webber). Whether both have been bullied into a kind of bubble silence by Pansy is up for debate.

Pansy also rails and rages at everyone she meets from her doctor and dentist to salespersons to the check-out girl at the supermarket — everyone pisses her off.

She is also physically and psychologically unwell and intensely fearful and suspicious of most people.

The narrative then introduces us to Pansy’s glass-half-full sister, single mom Chantelle (a terrific Michele Austin), whose nature seems to completely contrast Pansy’s. Chantelle is a hairdresser with two daughters who adore her. Her world is chock full of joy and joviality, except, of course, when she’s around Pansy. But Chantelle refuses to give up on her sister. And in a climactic Mother’s Day scene, we are given bits of clues as to why Pansy is so despairing.

But Leigh, quite perspicaciously, refuses to fill in all the blanks. He does give us a few pieces to Pansy’s puzzle. And the lack of specifics enhances both the film and the brilliant central performance because we must shade in that history ourselves.

I found myself thinking about people in my family and my life, growing up, who I judged harshly for being so mean, so grudging of other’s people’s success, so disgusted with their lives. But I rarely stopped to wonder just how they got there.  And that they’re just as deserving of being loved as anyone else.

Sure, Pansy is probably severely depressed and with meds might be less so, but that’s not the point of the movie, which asks that we stop, for a moment—or 97 minutes–and realize that there’s usually much more going on inside a person than what they show us on the outside—that it’s so easy condemn and label people we find irritating or maddening, but it might behoove us to take a moment and try and reach them.

I’ve never been the biggest Mike Leigh fan. I’ve found his work taxing, and overrated with few exceptions, those being, Life is Sweet, Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and Another Year. But Hard Truths hit me, well, hard.

The film is a towering tour de force for Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who tears through it like a feral, rabid animal. Her Pansy is difficult to take, to say the least, but the payoff, late in the film, is emotionally devastating as we begin to potentially piece together why she’s so furiously unhinged, so supremely miserable. Oscar-nominated back in 1996 for Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, this is her finest work to date onscreen. She’s yet another major contender in a rich and crowded Lead Actress field.

Hard Truths may turn some people off, but if you can handle copious amounts of misanthropy and ample aggrieved bellowing, the payoff is mighty powerful.