‘Cheerful, grinning people. Can’t stand ’em…’
It’s very easy for a lifetime of disappointment and rejection to crystallise into a life of misanthropy in middle age. The Scrooge Effect, if you will. I’ve seen this in parents of friends and older co-workers, and as I creak toward middle age, I occasionally have to battle with it myself. Hard Truths, the 14th feature film from master director Mike Leigh, reckons with this hardening that sometimes occurs through the lens of a black family in modern-day Britain…
Pansy Deacon… what a creation. Portrayed here by Leigh favourite Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Pansy Deacon is the matriarch of a family that also includes her downtrodden son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and her silent brow-beaten husband, Curtley (David Webber). But this is a film about Pansy. A woman who makes the aforementioned Ebenezer Scrooge seem like Paul Rudd on a particularly sunny day. She argues with strangers. She verbally assaults her family. She steadfastly refuses to find even the tiniest morsel of joy in her life. Put simply, she is an antagonistic ball of fury. Chantelle (Michelle Austin), her much softer sister, tries to persuade Pansy to enjoy life a little more.
I’m unfamiliar with Jean-Baptiste and her work but her performance here is genuinely revelatory. She somehow toes the line between being massively overblown and melodramatic and utterly authentic. I believed in this character. I believed in her biting resentment and crippling anger and absurd stubbornness. I believed in this family. And over the course of 97 punishing minutes (although there are several moments of levity), Leigh even made me sympathise with this monstrous creation. Not through schmaltzy, unearned sentimentality, but through a simple presentation of a group of facts.
Hard Truths is, as the title suggests, pretty hard to sit through, particularly the first 20 minutes, which are so abrasive that I nearly had to turn the thing off, but if you can stick with it, you will be rewarded with the kind of sophisticated, eloquent character study that Leigh has made a career of. He remains a singular and captivating filmmaker.
