This year my American Film Institute’s annual Fest-going got off to a promising, auspicious start with my very first movie of the Festival, Hard Truths by Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s best filmmakers ever. With few exceptions—notably 1999’s Topsy-Turvy, about the fabled Gilbert and Sullivan musical team, and 2014’s Mr. Turner, about the great painter J.M.W. Turner—Leigh’s outstanding oeuvre has focused on ordinary people and working-class heroes/heroines. A prime example of Leigh’s admirable emphasis on everyday people is 1996’s sublimely beautiful Secrets & Lies, which received five Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Director.
In 2015 I was lucky enough to catch up with Leigh at the Zurich Film Festival and asked the maestro: “Hollywood movies largely feature superheroes and movie stars. Why are the protagonists of your films about common people?” Dismissive of Tinseltown’s film franchise fetish and obsession with comic book characters, Leigh defiantly replied: “Everybody has a story to tell.”
Truly an admirable, egalitarian sentiment, but if true, this doesn’t necessarily mean that every single individual’s saga is worthy of their personal story being told and dramatized for the public at large, onscreen or onstage or on the page. Along these lines, a strong case, alas, could be made against Hard Truths, which is a sort of thematic follow-up to the infinitely superior Secrets & Lies, which also stars the excellent actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste (co-star of the FBI TV series Without a Trace), who was Academy Award-nommed for Best Supporting Actress for Secrets & Lies.
Related by title (I’m sure that’s quite intentional), whereas Secrets & Lies was a poignant film full of hope and love, Hard Truths is a dark, dreary, depressing drama that can be hard to take. Eighty-one-year-old writer/director Leigh’s downer opens with Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) awakening with a start. In fact, for some reason, she does so three times throughout the movie that feels much longer than 97 minutes. To make a long story short, the homely, stocky Pansy has a totally negative disposition and is universally critical of everyone she encounters, from her long-suffering husband Curtley (whom she is indeed very curt to, as played by a tearful David Webber) and her 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), to total strangers.
The disputatious Pansy becomes embroiled in completely unnecessary arguments with cashiers and fellow shoppers online with her, employees at a furniture store, and even her dentist and doctor, with whom Pansy has made appointments in order to try to explain and solve her unending series of aches and pains. Her kvetching is so annoying and unwarranted that characters in the drama actually laugh at her for being so absurdly ridiculous. But make no mistake, Hard Truths is no comedy, indeed far from it. Released by Bleecker Street, this film really couldn’t be much bleaker.
Viewers can’t figure out if Pansy’s infinite agonies are due to her resoundingly negative disposition or the other way around. The film provides precious little background to explain her woes, although there’s some dialogue with younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) that intimates Pansy had an unhappy childhood. (You certainly don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to deduce that.) Chantelle is an upbeat person (except when fretting about her miserable big sister) and there’s a scene or two between the solo mom and her exuberant, full-of-life daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson) goofing around that may seem gratuitous at first, but in retrospect totally fit. Chantelle’s lively adult children stand in stark contrast to the glum, withdrawn, videogame-playing, bullied, perpetually headphone-wearing Moses, always trying to distance himself from his hypercritical mother and the misery she has inflicted upon her household.
Why is Pansy (who is unable to work) so unhappy? The entire milieu of Hard Truths is the contemporary British Black middle class. The hardworking if, as said, long-suffering Curtley seems to make a decent living as a plumber, providing decently for his family, who live in the three-story attached house with a backyard that Leigh’s melodrama opens and closes with. Leigh has made moving movies about the underdog, such as his previous fact-based historical epic about a proletarian rebellion, 2018’s Peterloo. But unless because I am a Caucasian American and not finely tuned to British Blacks, as far as I could discern, there’s only one scene in Hard Truths that seems to explicitly deal with racism and the ethnic power hierarchy: When Kayla’s white female boss is rudely dismissive of her pitch of a product to push at the company where she works (and tellingly lies about later over drinks with her sister).
As suggested, Pansy’s backstory is largely untold. Where did her forebears come from before they alighted in England? The Caribbean? Africa? What made Secrets & Lies so superb and such a joy to behold (in repeat viewings, by the way) is that while those characters had problems, there was a quite beautiful resolution. No, not a phony-baloney “happily-ever-after” one, but a profoundly human denouement, with an affirmation of life, love, and family that’s largely lacking in Hard Truths. British cinema was known for Kitchen Sink Dramas, realistic depictions of working-class existence, and for “Angry Young Man” movies, like 1959’s Look Back in Anger and 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Pansy is a lonely middle-aged woman who, for some reason viewers smarter than I may be able to explain to me, is ceaselessly suffering.
I suspect that sitting through this hard-to-take cry-fest requires superpowers found in those flicks Leigh scorns and is mainly for hardcore Mike Leigh fans (among them this critic), fans of tragedies, and people interested in the contemporary conditions of the British Black middle class. It does bear mentioning, however, that Hard Truths received a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The trailer can be seen here.
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