Hal Kitchen
One of the most significant elements to an interracial relationship is in the families you each come from. You might think there are some universal truths to families, but different cultures have very different attitudes towards family life and very different ideas as to what a healthy family dynamic looks like, and division is often along lines of ethnicity as it is those of class or gender. In my limited experience of “marrying into” a mixed-race British family, the two sides we see in Hard Truths are an exceptionally articulate portrait of the warmth and the dysfunction within. Women oversharing everything and men sharing nothing at all. Perhaps “portrait” is the wrong word though because although much of the discussion around the film has focused on Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s extraordinary lead performance—of which more later—it is much more of an ensemble piece than I had expected. Therefore, a landscape would be more appropriate, some figures in the foreground, others in the background, each one carrying a little world unto themselves, and it’s hard to overstate quite how refreshingly wonderful it is to see a realistic black family, and indeed cast, given this kind of spotlight.
Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, but if ever there were a woman who did not embody the character of a flower, it’s her. Pansy is hostile, judgmental, and fatally incapable of relating to others. She’s the antithesis of Sally Hawkins’s Poppy from Mike Leigh’s previous film Happy-Go-Lucky. Where Poppy was unwaveringly positive about everything, Pansy is all stress and tension waiting to spring back in the first face that looks her way. She’s never had a hurtful or bitter word she felt like keeping to herself. In any other movie, she’d be the cruel stepmother or the bitter tyrant our younger heroine must spread her wings and fly as far as possible away from. In Hard Truths, she’s the one who needs to fly. As we follow Pansy through a series of unreasonably aggressive and often hysterically funny confrontations with retail workers, fellow shoppers and family members, we filter down to the roots of her discontent. She’s lived a life without love. Her husband Curtley (David Webber) has long given up trying, if he ever did and between his father’s complete disinterest and his mother’s constant criticism, their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) looks for and finds nothing in himself. Pansy cannot find anything to enjoy or to take pride in and no one close to her offers her anything resembling affection. No one that is except her sister Chantal (Michele Austen).
Chantal has a steady career as a hairdresser, no husband tying her down, two loving daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) who are moderately successful business professionals, and no real cause for complaints. Her house is half the size of Pansy’s but four times as full. And she talks. She talks to her daughters, to her clients, and even to Pansy. She’s the one person who can almost battle her way through Pansy’s defenses to have an actual conversation. Almost. Between them, the two women display two different attitudes towards life and the struggles it offers. Yes, as the younger sister Chantal had it easier, but she also doesn’t wage a daily war on everything and everyone around her, each day dying a new death on a new pointless hill the way Pansy does.
It is the first and last thing anyone says about Hard Truths, but that’s for good reason and I’ll echo it: Marianne Jean-Baptiste is absolutely incredible. You completely believe this woman exists. You’ve met women exactly like her and it probably ruined your day too. She really should be impossible to empathize with, but by the end, you’re completely rooting for her to take charge of her life, shrug off this useless husband and go find a way to be happy. And yet you even find a way to feel sorry for him too. His priorities are all wrong, he’s selfish, boring, and joyless, but he didn’t choose to be any more than Pansy did, and she is clearly not an easy woman to live with. But again, maybe she wouldn’t be so angry all the time if he showed her a little tenderness and consideration once in a while. And poor Moses stuck in the middle of it too. There’s such a good balance between each of the characters, there’s not a single character in the central sextet who we don’t understand to our core. What a fantastic ensemble cast. Baptiste has received the garlands and she deserves it, the Oscars are a joke for leaving her off, but you know, Michele Austen deserved her flowers too. Down to the smallest role, there’s not a person onscreen in Hard Truths who doesn’t feel real. When one performance is great, credit the actor, when all the performances are great, credit the director, and when all the performances are this great, that’s when you know that everyone on set was just crushing it day after day after day.
Unfortunately I do have one significant reservation about Hard Truths, and that’s that I really wanted it to be longer. That’s probably the most complementary complaint you can have for a film but I really do mean it, it felt like there was at least an hour’s worth of story left to tell by the time Hard Truth‘s credits start to roll. I could tell it was winding down to finishing but there was so much left to wrap up. I can appreciate an open or ambiguous ending but I really wanted to get some more closure and just some more time with these wonderful, awful characters. Don’t get me wrong, the real climax after the dinner was magnificent, but the epilogue sort of backpedals and I understand why the film should wish to leave on the note that it did, but I did walk away with more than a touch of “that’s it?” going through my head. Not all films need to be satisfying in a traditional sense though, a lack of closure can be more rewarding in the long run and maybe a rewatch will solidify the appropriateness of that ending. For now, I’m still quite comfortable calling Hard Truths Mike Leigh’s best film since Another Year and one of the most brilliant—and indeed funniest—character dramas in recent memory.
