After two period dramas in a row, English director Mike Leigh returns to his favorite milieu, present-day London, for Hard Truths, another vividly etched character piece guaranteed to produce laughs and winces in equal measure. The center of attention is Pansy, a middle-aged, middle-class agoraphobe and clean freak caught in a state of perpetual agitation. As embodied by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in her juiciest role since Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, nearly 30 years ago, she is an excruciatingly real creation, a walking migraine with an axe to grind with the world. Call her the first great protagonist of the post-Covid era, which left the spectrum of humanity with shortened fuses.
Pansy’s plumber husband (David Webber) has cocooned himself against his wife’s verbal lashings, electing only to make eye contact until the tirades subside. Their only child, 22-year-old Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), is a plus-size layabout, practically mute, prone to taking long strolls to escape his mother’s volcanic temper. Pansy also has a younger sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a genial hairstylist with two daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown), who at least attempts to engage with her verbally. It turns out that Pansy raised her younger sister after the untimely death of their mother, a bitter and demanding single woman. What emerges slowly from this matrix of relationships is the hard truth that Pansy’s unhappiness extends beyond the ordinary into the realm of the spiritual. “Why don’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle asks. “I don’t know!” Pansy replies. She’s not lying.
The authentic characterizations are a direct result of Leigh’s unusual, tried-and-true method of working with actors. Starting without a script, they essentially make up the movie as they go along. First, Leigh meets with each actor and asks them to make a list of people they’ve known. (Jean-Baptiste apparently had 130 in her mental rolodex.) From there, they go about piecing together traits until a character is formed, after which follows the premise and then scene building. The script, such as it is, proceeds from the improvisations of the performers during extensive rehearsals.
Leigh can make the slightest move of the needle feel momentous.
Collaboration at this level explains how deeply each of the performers seems to understand their part. Jean-Baptiste, though not as actively unpleasant as David Thewlis in Naked, is essentially the antithesis of Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, to name two other unforgettable Leigh creations. She can be uproariously funny when chewing out a snippy furniture-store sales associate or a po-faced grocery-store cashier, and then veer on a dime into heart-stopping pathos as she struggles to place a bouquet of flowers in a vase. (The irony of a woman named Pansy having an aversion to flowers is another of the film’s neat little touches.) The chemistry between Jean-Baptiste and Austin is particularly strong, perhaps owing to the fact that they played siblings in Leigh’s 1993 stage play, It’s a Great Big Shame!, and have remained friends ever since.
For the first-time viewer — that is, for those who have managed to avoid every Leigh film since his 1971 debut feature, Bleak Moments — the story may appear to be burdened with irrelevancies, scenes that add up without seeming to arrive anywhere. Indeed, in terms of scale, the two major set pieces turn out to be a Mother’s Day lunch and a trip to a gravesite, the first ending in hysterical tears and laughter, the latter in a poignant dialogue about maternal neglect. There are no textbook character arcs, no Hollywood endings, no revelations beyond the familiar bromide that all members of the human race are, in some way or another, prisoners of their own making. Each character is permitted only an inch of personal growth. But this is, after all, a Mike Leigh movie, and it is the magic of this particular filmmaker that he can make the slightest move of the needle feel momentous. Walking the perilously thin line between satire and drama, operating simultaneously as caricaturist and humanist, Leigh turns the trivial into the universal. ❖
Nathaniel Bell is a Los Angeles–based writer who has been writing for L.A. Weekly and the Village Voice since 2021.