Movie Review: Mike Leigh Delivers 'Hard Truths'

Hard Truths

Directed by Mike Leigh

Written by Mike Leigh

Starring Marianne Jean Baptiste, Michele Austin

Released September 2024

Published December 2nd, 2024

Hard Truths is a hard watch. The film centers on a performance by Marianne Jean Baptiste, who portrays Pansy, that is often deeply unpleasant. Pansy is a miserable woman whose undiagnosed depression is expressed via deep seated anger and resentment of everyone around her. And I do mean everyone. This includes her patient and devoted husband Curtley (David Webber), their deeply morose son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and Pansy’s loving and open hearted sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin).

But I said, everyone and I meant it. Thus, when Pansy leaves her home, which is a rarity, she inflicts her vitriol on store clerks, doctors, dentists, and anyone who comes across her path. The film is oppressive in presenting Pansy’s rage as a constantly boiling cauldron splashing molten anger as it begins to overflow everywhere. Pansy is so all-consuming that the movie switches gears to bring us into the lives of Chantelle and her two lovely young daughters, Kayla (Ari Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) as a way of allowing the audience a moment to breathe.

The walking on eggshells tension of Pansy’s home is the complete opposite of the warmth and laughter of Chantelle’s tiny apartment that she shares with her two loving and vibrant daughters. Similarly, the hulking and morose figure of Moses stands as a counterpoint to Aleisha and Kayla. Moses is a large young man but his manner is that of a traumatized teddy bear, an Eeyore type figure who has seen so much sadness in his relatively few years on Earth that he finds it hard to see anything else.

Moses and Curtley are kept at a distance by director Mike Leigh in a way that mirrors how Pansy keeps them at a distance. Meanwhile, Chantelle has a way of breaking the distance between herself and her sister that is underscored by the scenes of Chantelle being joyous, friendly, warm, and a terrific mother. Leigh’s crosscutting of these lives is a way of using film technique to tell the story that words can’t quite grasp. It’s what makes Leigh such a fascinating and unpredictable director.

Marianne Jean Baptiste’s performance is powerful but deeply hard to endure. Pansy is a nasty character with few redeeming qualities. You keep waiting for a moment of catharsis, a moment where the boil will die down to a simmer, but that moment remains elusive throughout Hard Truths, right through an ending that leaves you to decide where the story goes next. I’m of two minds on Baptiste’s performance. On one hand, I can’t help but admire her effort. On the other hand, the performance has a broad, showy quality, one that typically appeals to awards voters because we can really see the acting taking place. I find this kind performance to be off-putting as it tends to break my immersion in the movie.

That said, the scenes between Marianne Jean Baptiste and Michele Austin have an emotional power to them that I cannot deny. Another fellow critic, Pajiba’s Jason Adams, rightly points out that Baptiste can do more with a single tear than most actors can accomplish with reams of dialogue. When that tear arrives, in the midst of bringing the two families together in the same place for the first time, the power of the moment is undeniable. You can’t help but feel the fraught tension between the joy of Chantelle’s home and the sandpapery discomfort of Pansy’s home with Curtley and Moses.

Aside from the main story, Mike Leigh delivers a moment of visual purity and compassion that moved me as much as any scene in 2024. It involves Moses, the shy, sad, hulking young man who likes taking quiet walks and losing himself in thoughts about planes. As Moses is sitting lonesome next to a fountain, a young, bubbly and beautiful young woman takes an interest in him. She offers him some candy and asks to sit next to him. We only view the scene from a distance and we cannot hear what is being said, but it is clear that a bridge is being built between these two people and our hearts leap for young, lonesome Moses, as we can see a mix of anxiety, confusion, curiosity, and the first sparks of joy in our time with him.

Hard Truths is not any easy watch. It’s raw and emotionally brutal at times. The character of Pansy will cause many audiences to want to turn away. Those that can find the vibe of Hard Truths however, will be rewarded with a movie of powerful moments that add up to a deeply sad yet satisfying whole, a portrait of loneliness, depression, anger, and the joy of connection. It’s an incredibly well observed drama featuring characters unlike any others in modern cinema, lives we rarely see depicted at the movies. In that way, it’s classically Mike Leigh, a man fascinated by real lives among real people.

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