Hard Truths

“Hard Truths” begins as middle-aged mother and wife Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) wakes up with a scream, as if exiting a nightmare. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that wasn’t right at all; she’s not exiting a nightmare, she’s entering a nightmare, a waking one that never seems to stop. The global COVID-19 pandemic is not explicitly mentioned in writer/director Mike Leigh’s movie, but it is felt, in the sanitizer on the kitchen counter, and the masks that Pansy wears for medical appointments, and the deliberately sterile nature of her home. More than that, though, it is felt in Pansy’s explosive, all-encompassing rage, and how no one is safe from it, whether it’s a doctor or a dental hygienist trying to help her, or an angry man berating her in a car park, epitomizing the decay of public behavior post-pandemic. On several occasions Pansy deems herself “a sick woman” though this sickness is ever explicated, making me think of a different version of Julianne Moore in “Safe,” lashing out rather than shutting down, a woman who is sick but does not know why, plagued by a deep-seated societal disease she cannot name. 

Pansy spends her days caring for and cleaning up after her husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). At dinner, Leigh’s camera essentially sits in the fourth chair of their square table watching as Pansy, positioned between the two men, airs an unceasing list of grievances while the two men shovel food in their mouths, hardly even seeming to hear what she says, allowing us to feel the weight of a thousand dinners just like this one. Though Curtley owns his own business, he is neither helpful nor industrious around the home, and neither is Moses, though Leigh is shrewd to present them as both part of the problem and undeserving of such bile. Though Moses barely speaks, that does not feel like a mere character tic but an outgrowth of having been worn to the nub. Even his capping scene feels earned, seen in a wide shot that makes it seem like benevolent deity is giving him a nod by giving him a break. 

Pansy is juxtaposed against her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who listens to her clients and trades jokes with them, and whose knickknack filled home functions itself as a juxtaposition to Pansy’s sterile one just as her buoyant daughters Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson) differ sharply from the morose Moses. It’s almost too sharp a difference, really, between the two, and though Leigh does try to muddy it up with a conversation between the daughters where neither divulges their own troubles in life, it is never followed up, feeling too much like a loose thread. Austin shades her performance with real depth, evincing a genuine patience of what it must take to share blood with someone like Pansy. A visit by the sisters to their mother’s grave becomes the linchpin of the movie, revealing the hardest truth. Though it’s hinted that Pansy has still not recovered from this death, neither is this presented as the ultimate answer as we are conditioned to expect.

Long before the image in which Leigh casts the shadows of venetian blinds across Pansy’s face, the familiar notion of being locked inside a metaphorical prison, Jean-Baptiste has already summoned this sensation in her performance. It’s honestly remarkable what she does throughout “Hard Truths,” and I feel like even now, weeks later, I’m still trying to digest and process it but that the feeling of it lingers. Pansy’s misanthropy evokes Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” honestly, the bracing humor almost sneaking up on your, and her myriad meltdowns suggest another Julianne Moore character, the one in “Magnolia,” but Jean-Baptiste is not deliberately exaggerated in the same way, neither comedically nor melodramatically. It’s something else entirely. It’s veracity in full roar. She opens a vein and bleeds onto the screen.