Hard Truths (2024) review

Dir. Mike Leigh

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

If someone you know and/or love has been suffering from mental illness, be it depression, schizophrenia, anhedonia, or paranoia, you might find yourself coming face-to-face with it in Hard Truths. That face is that of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays Pansy, an irascible, angry woman who can’t seem to stop shouting, screaming, and fighting her way through life, even when no such threat is presented. Pansy’s blank stares, violent mood-swings, lethargy, and her “they’re out to get me” attitude” — both vocalized by her and seen in practice as she nervously watches the pigeons peck in her backyard — are all ones I’ve had the misfortune of seeing first-hand in someone I love, like many others.

If they’re not familiar, not only consider yourself lucky, but consider what might be happening in the life of the next angry or withdrawn person you meet out in public.

Hard Truths is the latest from 81-year-old writer/director Mike Leigh, one of the chief humanist filmmakers of our time. It’s a quiet movie, despite Pansy’s outbursts and verbal tirades, one that forces you to spend time with its characters during the seemingly banal moments in their lives. It’s the nuances in scenes involving simple conversations, haircuts, small gatherings, and social situations that paint vivid pictures of these individuals. From early on, Leigh gets you on a modest wavelength that will have attentive viewers rewarded with a rich portrait of a complicated individual and her orbit.

For Charles Bukowski, it began with a mistake. For Pansy, it begins with a scream. Every morning, she’s jolted awake by an audible burst suggesting she had a nightmare. Maybe she did, but that’s probably how she’d describe every day of her life. She is brimful of fear, anger, and contempt for people. She’s too scared to venture out into her barren backyard, which would make a nice garden if she felt motivated to start one. Her London home is almost equally barren; her home doesn’t appear to be lived-in at all. She wears neutrals and spends most of her day cleaning, to which we wonder what could possibly be dirty.

Pansy’s husband and 22-year-old son have been beaten down by their matriarch’s incessant negativity that they basically live their own lives in silence. Her husband, Curtley (David Webber), is stoic yet meek, a plumber who spends most of his days on job-sites before returning to home sweet hell. He carries a weathered half-smirk and heavy eyes. There used to be charisma beyond them at one point. Her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), quietly dreams of flying planes, but can’t so much as go for a walk without his mom warning he might get picked up by police.

Whether it’s when they each arrive home, or over dinner, Pansy can’t help but berate them. When they’re not around, she ventures out into the public, where she ostensibly doesn’t know how not to start a conversation that isn’t an argument. She belittles the floor manager of a furniture store. She lashes out at a man in the parking lot, a grocery store clerk, and people who put coats on their animals. “Cheerful, grinnin’ people,” she spits out with sheer venom at one point. “Can’t stand ’em out there.”

Pansy’s sister, Chantal (Michele Austin), is a total contrast. She has a lovely relationship with her two grown daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), and looks forward to cutting hair for the conversations with her clients that will inevitably arise. Chantal is the only person with whom Pansy can open up. Even then, her sister is the equivalent of a jar that budges a millimeter when opening with brute force.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste does what appears impossible in making Pansy pitiable yet fascinating. It’s hard to take your eyes off a powder keg that blows at the slightest brush. Make no mistake, there is humor in her tirades. She strikes me as someone who would at least tolerate a walk around the city with someone like Larry David or Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham in The Holdovers, and maybe even snicker at one of their provoking barbs or acidic monologues. But Pansy is hurting deeply, so much so that she is unable to express why her first reaction to anything is negative. Jean-Baptiste delicately handles this role, her painful eyes and blank gazes communicating decades worth of something we don’t know.

Don’t sleep on the warmth and exuberance of Michele Austin either. She’s the type of person who might make a spontaneous comment in your direction while the two of you wait in line at the grocery store. It might prompt an equally spontaneous conversation. Request a perm and sit in her chair at the salon, and you will find a fast friend. Chantal isn’t overbearingly positive — despite frankly anyone fitting that description after spending so much time with Pansy — but she knows how to get people to talk and reveal themselves to her. Austin so deftly handles this role, and is the emotional soul of the movie, right alongside Tuwaine Barrett’s Moses.

Consider a scene when Pansy and Chantal go to visit their mother’s grave. At the plot, Pansy can’t help but bitch and moan about how their mom loved her counterpart more, how someone should clean and tidy the graves, and how it doesn’t matter who puts flowers on th…

“Why can’t you enjoy life?,” Chantal barks at Pansy,
“I don’t know,” Pansy says, pausing, choking on her words. “I’m so tired. I just want to lie down and close my eyes. I want it all to stop.”

I’ve come to realize those last two sentences, or some variation of them, are among the saddest a human can utter. How do you respond to a loved one in their foggy, depressive state who says to you, with complete sincerity, “I’m only happy when I sleep.”

Hard Truths is another incredibly character study from Mike Leigh. Leigh crafts this picture with impressionism that affords the viewer many different ways to read scenes and lines of dialog. He threads it all together through interpersonal relationships that feel organic. Hard Truths is one of those movies that will marinate in your mind, if you let it, so much so that what you initially be perceived as anticlimactic ending is in fact a pivotal one. We won’t see these characters ever again. Like friends of ours who have fallen out of contact, we hope for the best while trying to make ourselves happy and fulfilled in ways we think we know.

Starring: Marianna Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone, and Samantha Spiro. Directed by: Mike Leigh.