“I’m a sick woman,” says Pansy Deacon, the newest in a long line of demanding heroines on offer from filmmaker Mike Leigh. By the time we hear this in Leigh’s Hard Truths, none of us, neither on-screen nor off, would move to dispute her. In the first place, anyone watching knows by now that it would only bring grief. Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is not an easy woman. There is no pleasing her. In the familiar way of Leigh’s more difficult leads, Pansy is a woman overcome by her own deteriorating sense of dissatisfaction.
Certainly life isn’t perfect, but Pansy’s rage feels out of proportion with the world’s everyday failures. It takes up space; it makes the people closest to her—namely her overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who’s been bullied into silence; her hardworking but not always sympathetic husband, Curtley (David Webber); and her comparatively saintly sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin)—minimize themselves for Pansy’s sake. And for their own sakes. “A sick woman,” Pansy says, and this inevitably describes her actual health, to some degree—hers is a flavor of spirit-rot familiar to anyone with chronic, debilitating pain, though a medical checkup confirms that this is not Pansy’s issue, exactly. Regardless, the word applies in another sense. She’s sick—of everything.
This is a woman who wakes up, without variation, screaming. The sun shines into her room and birds call out, and the familiar routine playing out just outside of her window fills Pansy with apparent terror. She shoots awake like a woman being tortured in her dreams. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is an actor of prodigious warmth and subtlety, qualities on display since early in her career, when she starred in Leigh’s popular Secrets & Lies (1996) as a young Black woman who finds out her birth mother is an unhappily erratic Brenda Blethyn. In that movie, Blethyn played the complicated Leigh heroine, railing against the day like someone with too little else—love, especially—to occupy her. That woman, at least, gets the relief of being reunited with the daughter she’d been forced to give up for adoption when she was but a teenager—a midlife shock that reorients her for the better. Hard Truths gives Pansy no such relief.
Instead, we arrive at scene after scene of Pansy’s fury. The premise of Hard Truths is that a short window into the life of this woman is worthy of observation. And so, we watch. The dramatic backbone of the film is simple: Mother’s Day is coming up, and Chantelle has asked Pansy to visit their mother’s grave together—a somewhat suspense-filled request, as we realize that Pansy is incredibly avoidant on the subject of their mother. In typical Leigh fashion, scenes from Pansy and Chantelle’s home and the day-to-day work pile up around this central strand, as the story builds its psychological portrait of Pansy, and we do our best to stand clear of the fireworks that ensue.
I’ve heard the complaint that Hard Truths’ plot doesn’t make for much of a movie, but the valuation of Pansy’s inner life, rife with questions about just what is going on with her and whether anyone within the film will come to understand it, is the plot. Leigh’s trademark approaches—the dramatically significant reaction shots, the subtextual selves bubbling up within each conversation—are all on display here and are not original. But the story itself, with its microfocus on impotent rage, feels revelatory.
Hard Truths is Leigh’s first feature since the wrongly underseen historical epic Peterloo (2018). Unlike that film, this is a return to Leigh’s more common mode: the working-class tragicomedy. It shares more than a little DNA with films like Leigh’s All or Nothing (unhappy marriage, unhealthy children) and characters like that played by a brutish Eddie Marsan in Happy-Go-Lucky, whose impatient driving instructor proved a remarkable foil to that movie’s unsettlingly upbeat heroine, Poppy. A moral question that arises in Leigh’s work is how to sympathize with such people: and yet we frequently do. Leigh’s work demands it of us. In Hard Truths, his characters learn to demand it of themselves.
Leigh’s filmmaking method is storied for its intensive rehearsals, in which a skeleton of a plot is fleshed out through improvisation with the actors over several weeks, then firmed up into a standard script, then filmed to the letter. Too much care is taken to grow these people from the ground up, treating them like thoroughly deliberated acts of actorly and writerly imagination, for the question of whether to sympathize to be taken seriously. We sympathize because the actors so clearly do.
Pansy’s rage often reveals her sensitivities and vulnerability. In one scene, she harasses a young couple trying out a sofa at the furniture store for being too publicly intimate, then spars with the employee trying to help her—the offer of help is seen as a charge that Pansy is incapable of maneuvering on her own, rather than the dutiful retail check-in that it is. Her rants seem to take on lives of their own, and often appear to be all she has got. Annoyance at a store clerk quickly segues to annoyance at the woman’s looks, and an insistent questioning of her intelligence (“Why do you wear so much makeup? What if it comes off on all the furniture?”). Later, at a grocery store, Pansy yells at a slow cashier, then gets chastised by the women in line behind her, until finally surviving a knockout round in the parking lot with a man angling to park in her spot.
Leigh often massages the spines of his dramas through contrasts, foils, and illuminating differences. Hard Truths works much the same. Pansy is nothing like her sister, Chantelle, a hairdresser whose salon is always full, and whose home life, with her lively twentysomething daughters, is abundant. Look at the way Pansy’s family operates in comparison: An early dinner scene gives us Pansy framed on either side by the blank slates of her browbeaten son and husband, who sit silently nibbling away as Pansy expounds on the charity workers who annoy her (“Cheerful, grinning people … can’t stand ’em,”) and the neighbor who offends her (“What’s her baby got pockets for?”). Chantelle and her daughters chat, dance, gossip, and sit together on the couch. Leigh’s methods are simple but sublime: The sun beams into Pansy’s kitchen through her large patio windows, bright rays washing the walls in warm light, and the effect is to notice the emptiness. It’s an emptiness with people in it.
In his best work, Leigh’s method so rigorously fleshes out the dimensions of these people’s inner muck that we seem to see straight into them, seem to feel that we know these people as we know ourselves, and—importantly—as we would like to be known: fully dimensioned, neither good nor bad, just human. There’s a startling humanism to Leigh’s work, one that in the hands of other filmmakers could have the life squeezed out of it by characters whose God-willed redemption and feats of understanding we can already see coming from a mile away.
Hard Truths succeeds by being somewhat unpredictable. When Pansy and Chantelle visit their mother’s grave, we predict the scene at the cemetery in which Pansy’s hard wall begins to crack, and she breaks down, finally expressing herself fully to her sister. The less predictable part comes later, back at Chantelle’s home. It’s less of an explosion than the slow release of a pressure valve, well-earned tears that convince us because of how unsettling they are for everyone else to witness. Jean-Baptiste buries Pansy’s discontent in her face, contorted and tense with grief and fury for most of the film, and her body, gnarled with feeling.
Seeing that softly erode—sensing all that must be happening within—is the kind of payoff Leigh has trained his viewers to want to see. We want to see it for Pansy’s sake; we also want to see Jean-Baptiste rise to the occasion. We are too impressed to be unaware that this is a performance. But the brilliance of this performance is that, like Pansy, we grow to want to know just what the hell is wrong with this woman—what would help? It’s the kind of overt movie psychology that, at the great risk of being too straightforward, invites our curiosity. And earns it.
A risk Leigh takes in this film—the first of his works to feature an entirely Black cast—is in allowing Pansy to flirt with the trope of the angry Black woman. From the start, Pansy is more than that; she is not merely angry, and her brittleness never feels arbitrary, even as it seems so senseless. A woman who calls her own walled-off, impeccably neat backyard a “godforsaken wilderness”—who’s afraid to even stand on her own back patio—has problems that no one racialized trope can contain. Still, there is the brunt of her; when a stranger calls her a bitch, you wince because the film makes you feel like you know her well enough to know that the term is unfair, but, look, you’ve seen her behavior, you get their point.
But anger is not the word. There’s too much uncertainty, too much fear—this we understand. The difficult thing about Pansy is that it’s hard to imagine what comes next for her, and for the people around her. Where can such fear lead her, or anyone? Glimpses into the lives of Pansy’s nieces give us a clear view of what we do not want for the future of these younger women—that is, for them to grow as imperceptible to each other as their aunt has to their mother. Late in the film, Pansy’s son, who spends most of the film on long walks by himself or sneaking away to binge food in privacy, eventually makes a friend, and we watch from a distance as the walls that have shuttered him in to this point gently crack on their surface. It is a touching, but damning thing, to realize that this, a single interaction with a kind woman he’s only just met, may be all that it takes—this alone may be enough to save him.
In the broad scheme, Hard Truths is not at all new terrain for Leigh, which is to say that curiosity about the future of these characters is natural, because airtight resolutions are not this filmmaker’s bag. Hard Truths benefits from what it doesn’t do, in a sense. It’s too funny, and Pansy is too drastic, to be saddled with the accusations of kitchen-sink dreariness that his earlier work sometimes earned but more frequently had to deflect. You cannot say the film is too neat, because its ending is not neat. The ending unsettles us—not because anything drastic happens, but because life goes on, people’s circumstances change, and what this means for someone so immovable as Pansy is hard to predict, but predictably downbeat.
Often, Leigh will linger in the final stretches of his films. We’ve seen the damage, taken stock of these personalities, drawn our own mental maps of how they might change: Now, let us sit. The film resists the easy pathways to personal growth that we frankly might wish to impose on it. Pansy is who she is. This, on its own terms, is worthy of our grief.
