Producer: Georgina Lowe Director: Mike Leigh Screenplay: Mike Leigh Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone, Gary Beadle, Hiral Varsani, Samantha Spiro, Ruby Bentall, Diveen Henry, Bryony Miller, Ashna Rabheru, Jo Martin, Llewella Gideon, Naana Agyei Ampadu, Donna Banya, Syrus Lowe, Elliot Edusah and Tiwa Lade Distributor: Bleecker Street
Grade: B+
Anger is a constant in the life of Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the perpetually furious, utterly belligerent housewife who’s the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.” Brilliantly embodied by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, she’s a person you would never want to meet—except on screen, the polar opposite to the unfailingly optimistic, good-natured Poppy whom Sally Hawkins played in Leigh’s delightful 2008 “Happy-Go-Lucky.”
Pansy picks fights with virtually everyone she encounters, be it a driver (Gary Beadle) she tussles with over a parking spot (he has the temerity to inquire whether she’s about to leave it—a question that escalates into a vitriolic shouting match), a clerk (Alice Bailey Johnson) who unwisely offers to help her pick out a couch in a department store as well as a couple (Elliot Edusah and Tiwa Lade) she berates for being too cuddly on a floor model, a doctor (Ruby Bentall) or dentist (Hiral Varsani) she assumes to be incompetent or insufficiently solicitous, and even a couple of customers (Diveen Henry and Bryony Miller) waiting in the check-out line behind her at a store. (The cashier, played by Ashna Rabheru, simply smiles vacantly at the brouhaha, perhaps accustomed to such verbal skirmishes.)
If outsiders are often targets of her rage, however, her family feels the brunt of it. Her husband Curtley (David Webber), a self-employed plumber, bears up stoically under her harangues, which include complaints about his employment of Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone), a competent, reliable fellow, as his assistant rather than their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). And yet she’s equally hard on Moses, a burly, gentle twenty-two year old who spends most of his day in his bedroom playing video games, except when he goes out for long, rambling walks, on which he might meet a pleasant girl (Donna Banya) but is more likely to be accosted by bullying boys. Both husband and son have been beaten down by Pansy’s shrill, relentless badgering and her incessant barbs about the state of the world.
Her fury is also directed against her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a stylist in a hair salon who’s as congenitally upbeat as Pansy is ill-tempered. Even when Chantelle is doing her hair, no doubt gratis, Pansy can’t resist being abrasive. But Chantelle maintains her sunny disposition, and her home life is far from the bleakness of her sister’s. She’s a single mother to two grown daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who have good positions, the former as a marketing executive and the latter as a legal intern. Both seem eminently well-adjusted and happy, despite Kayla’s boss (Samantha Spiro) being rather a harpy (Syrus Lowe, as Kayla’s colleague, rolls his eyes at her nasty put-downs) and Aleisha’s (Naana Agyei Ampadu) being no less demanding, though in a nicer way.
What’s the cause of Pansy’s rage, which, in Jean-Baptiste’s ferocious performance (the result, like the entire film, of the intensive collaborative improvisation and rehearsal between Leigh and his cast that has been the writer-director’s creative modus operandi for decades), is at once scathingly hilarious, terrifying and profoundly sad?
On the surface it’s inexplicable: she’s living what seems a relatively comfortable middle-class life in a modest suburban house, which she keeps scrupulously clean, to the extent that it seems sterile (here, as elsewhere, Suzie Davies’ production design is impeccable, and Dick Pope’s cinematography crisply realistic): when she finds a banana peel Moses has left on a counter, she erupts, just as she does when a fox scampers into her back yard. (Chantelle’s apartment, by contrast, is alive with plants.) There are hints of an unhappy childhood with a mother who demanded much of her as the oldest child, and she’s constantly complaining of being unwell, taking to her bed and awakening with a horrified gasp from what would seem to be frightening, unspecified dreams.
But the film offers no simple explanation: Pansy is simply who she is, deeply depressed, always complaining about being tired and lonely, always ready to take out her seething vitriol on anyone and everyone. When Chantelle persuades her to visit their mother’s grave on the fifth anniversary of her death, after Pansy has repeatedly begged off committing to the trip on grounds of her supposed maladies, it’s a frosty event, filled with tension. Chantelle asks, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” to which she simply responds, “I don’t know,” adding, “It’s not fair.” When they repair to Chantelle’s place for a family meal, she refuses to eat; and when Moses gives her a bouquet for Mother’s Day, her reaction is more of horror than acceptance, and she withdraws into her private hell, which a domestic setback will deepen. Viewers expecting a last-act catharsis will instead be faced with imagining what might follow, reaching their own conclusions. Leigh isn’t about to tie everything up neatly and resolve the mysteries of human behavior he and his cast have fashioned.
Jean-Baptiste is the roaring center of “Hard Truths,” and she’s so overwhelming that it might be hard to properly appreciate the sterling performances by the cast of the cast. But they’re all exceptionally fine, especially Austin, who comforts her sister as best she can, an example of unconditional love if ever one existed. Tanie Reddin’s precise editing and Gary Yershon’s score, modulating between melancholy tones and brief turns to possible brightness, add to the technical polish.
Leigh, returning to the smaller scale of his early films, including “Secrets & Lies” (1996), his first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste, following forays into larger-scale works like “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo,” proves that as he enters his eighth decade he’s lost none of his touch in creating piercing portraits of characters whose complexity is both compelling and somehow baffling. If “Hard Truths” turns out to be his final film, it is one that again reaffirms the wisdom behind his idiosyncratic mode of filmmaking. It’s an extraordinarily vivid and provocative study of a woman constantly on the edge.