TIFF 2024 Film Review: Hard Truths

MIKE LEIGH AND MARIANNE JEAN-BAPTISTE STUN

Mike Leigh returns after six years away from the director’s chair with Hard Truths, a work of pure alchemy transforming misanthropic comedy into a brutal downer. Reuniting with his Secrets and Lies star, Leigh excavates the nooks and crannies of a small-scale drama with a towering deftness on the things left unspoken: Marianne Jean-Baptiste is absolutely titanic in what is likely the best performance of 2024. Minor spoilers ahead…

In 2008, director Mike Leigh made a movie called Happy-Go-Lucky, which starred Sally Hawkins as the incorrigibly bright and optimistic Poppy Cross. Where Poppy navigates her world with an resolute, illogical buoyancy that seemingly drives everyone up a wall, Hard Truth’s Pansy Deacon examines the flip side of grating cheeriness: a debilitating bitterness so caustic and violent that it makes going to the grocery store feel like the end of days. “Your balls are so backed up you’ve got sperm in your brain!” she screams at a man who has the gall to ask her if she’s leaving her parking space. Played like an absolute whirlwind by the titanic Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Pansy is a font of bubbling resentment and lashing anger that would strictly be played for laughs in lesser hands. And at times, Hard Truths mines the most out of its misanthropic comedy, but leave it to Leigh to excavate - from Pansy’s outrageous acidity - the nooks and crannies of the human condition and the spaces between words unspoken.

A departure from Leigh’s later oeuvre of expansive period dramas - Vera Drake, Mr. Turner, Peterloo - Hard Truths is a return to intimate, working class drama. Its modest London setting is perfect for Jean-Baptiste as a stick of raw dynamite: Pansy’s presence is one of a draconian temper that has her entire family walking on eggshells. From her demure - or is it weathered? - husband Curtley (an affectingly resigned David Webber) to her stunted, 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), those who share a roof with her are resigned to her miserable irrationality. Leigh resists the urge to unfurl any deep familial secrets or tragedies that made Pansy this way, and even more impressively, withholds the catharsis of any kind of breakthrough for his beleaguered protagonist. At one point, her exasperated sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) pleads: “Why can’t you just enjoy life?” A lifetime of embitterment and pain squeaks by Pansy’s jagged craquelure: “I. Don’t. Know.”

“…leave it to [Mike] Leigh to excavate - from Pansy’s outrageous acidity - the nooks and crannies of the human condition and the spaces between words unspoken.”

Marianne Jean-Baptiste just might give the performance of the decade in this barnburner role, but Hard Truths, like much of Leigh’s humanist filmography, is a relational movie: always vivid and always alive due to the tethers - seen and unseen - among its characters. The most obvious contrast in Hard Truths is Chantelle, a jovial antithesis to her sister Pansy’s wound-up ball of torment. Despite shouldering the same unspoken hurt and heartache that has withered Pansy into an insufferable tyrant, Chantelle radiates a different energy altogether: a positive spirit that is not only a rock for her stress-laden adult daughters, but also the one that affords her sister some grace. At one point, bewildered by yet another bout of Pansy’s exhausting negativity, she says: “I love you. I don’t understand you, but I love you.” Curtley and Moses fare much worse around Pansy, but David Webber and Tuwaine Barrett are revelations as silent sufferers who can say so much with their distance and sullen resignation.

With hardly any backstory, explanation, or exposition, Hard Truths drops us into an unmistakably human story that says everything it needs to within a 97-minute time frame. Mike Leigh and his tour de force ensemble - with a withholding that is a feature and not a bug - demonstrate a unique talent in harnessing the verisimilitude of internalized anguish, deftly hanging in the air a palpable pain relatable to anyone that might have a difficult family member. Trapped in a stasis of unprocessed feelings and accumulated trauma, Hard Truths is a searing, darkly comic meditation on the root misanthropy the only way Mike Leigh will allow: hand-in-hand with his indomitable muse and a tempest of feelings right beneath the surface.

A-