Hard Truths, Review: A Relentless Portrayal of Anger and Isolation from Mike Leigh
Hard Truths is the new film from writer-director Mike Leigh, and it re-unites the British filmmaker with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who played a significant role in perhaps Leigh’s best known work, Secrets & Lies back in 1996. Here Jean-Baptiste takes on the role of Pansy Deacon, a wife and mother apparently suffering from anxiety and depression, who alienates those around her with her erratic behaviour and venomous tirades. Her sister Chantelle, warmly played by Michelle Austin, does what she can to support her, and on Mother’s Day they convene over their mother’s grave to discuss past grievances.
Hard Truths, as the title would suggest, is one of Mike Leigh’s harder films to take pleasure in. The truth is, it’s a hard watch. Thematically the film could be taken as a counterpoint to his classic, Secrets & Lies, which portrayed a family who had spent years withholding secrets, leading to deep-seated resentment. In Hard Truths, by comparison, Pansy cannot stop telling the truth, at least as she sees it. She yells at a pretty young attendant at a furniture shop, at a man who wants her parking space, and, most memorably, at a tall, slender woman, with a receding chin and an overbite, for “standing there like an ostrich,” at the supermarket. As the cliché goes, she says what she sees, and she can’t help herself. All of this relentless anger leaves no room for anything else, and so by the film’s end, when she has been broken on the wheel of her own rage and has nothing left to say, her husband and son are almost equally broken and the family can do nothing but sit in painful silence. I said it was a hard watch.
Hard Truths is a film about a black British family, and captures the essence of a culture that exists within Britishness. It is there in the way Chantelle’s two young-adult daughters dance together, the way the older adults suck their teeth, the way Pansy affects an Afro-Caribbean lilt when she’s angry. But more than this, Hard Truths is a character study of someone who is reaching the peak of a mental health crisis, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a masterclass of acting to convey this. There is a nervous energy to her, a vulnerability in her over-animated face which somehow seeps through when she’s tearing strips off anyone who has upset her, and which manages to keep her in the audiences’ sympathies despite the effect she is having on those closest to her. Make no mistake, Leigh has drawn a powerhouse performance from Jean-Baptiste and the entire film hangs upon it.
Unlike Secrets & Lies, Hard Truths does not leave the audience with any satisfying answers or explanations, which seems fitting for the subject matter, but it will leave you thinking about Pansy and the impact her illness has had on her family, long after you leave the cinema. As to where it fits into Leigh’s body of work, it’s probably fair to call Hard Truths minor Leigh, certainly it doesn’t have the richness or depth of his great films, but by narrowing his focus Leigh achieves a relentlessness that we have not seen from him since David Thewlis went ranting through the streets in Naked (1993).
Hard Truths is released in UK cinemas from 31/01/2025
