Hard Truths (2024) - Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is a bottomless well in Mike Leigh’s return to the big screen

Credit: allocine.fr

There are surprisingly few hard truths to be found in Mike Leigh’s latest release, a tale of a repressed Black British family at breaking point, which comes after a seven year hiatus. This drama is tense, uncomfortably funny at times, and delivers one of the most pent up and cathartic cries ever to grace the big screen – but without these ‘hard truths’, it is a film that strangely lacks in any depth whatsoever, treating themes of grief, family bonds and mental illness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is at the heart of the family crisis as Pansy, a bitter woman who has borne the brunt of responsibility for too long. She ravenously cleans up after her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber who has long stopped asking if she is okay, and twenty-two year old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who wastes the day away playing video games and reading about planes in a room piled high with dirty crockery. The rest of the house is devoid of any decoration or personality as Marianne scrubs down the sofa with chemicals and berates Moses for leaving a banana skin on the otherwise spotless counter. Surfaces and ornaments are what she can control while the rest of the world ‘harasses’ her – the checkout lady who is too slow, the doctor who is the ‘wrong doctor’ and who looks like a mouse, the dentist checking her painful jaw, the woman who tries to help her at the furniture store. At home, she monopolises the conversation, ranting about the neighbour who told her to cheer up and the baby in the stroller (“what’s a baby need pockets for!”). It’s brilliantly written dialogue (or monologue, rather), but somewhere during her tirade, Hard Truths loses its way – Pansy has gone so far down the route of depression that as a character, she has very few redeeming qualities – we’ve all routed for an anti-hero, but in a film like this, it’s very hard to feel invested. Even her kind-hearted sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is at a loss, and so scenes in which the two interact are firstly funny, then vaguely unpleasant as, like having to sit through an elderly relative’s inappropriate diatribes, Pansy’s cynicism gets old.

The result looks like a character study lacking in any character at all – Pansy is evidently struggling, but the root of the cause and the journey there is never delved into enough to warrant sympathy or a desire for involvement. Sequences of the film see each character individually suffering – Moses is bullied in the street, Chantelle’s daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) struggle at work. Their relationship with their mother however is positioned as an immediate contrast to Pansy and her family, who offer each other no support and never once laugh or say a kind word to each other – it’s strangely obvious, stated in the plainest way possible. This family is miserable, and this one isn’t. Even Pansy and Chantelle’s relationship, really the most important, remains surprisingly surface level – the day on which part of the narrative takes place, Mother’s Day, alludes to a difficult childhood that favoured one sister over another, but a hug and a single tear down the cheek is just about as far as it goes. Chantelle is even surprised to hear her sister has been suffering. At the crux of the drama, Hard Truths seems to take a turn towards a conclusion, a closure of sorts for Pansy and her family – a drive home in silence suggests a new beginning, the potential for a turn in the road. But before they have a chance to take action, they immediately revert to past behaviours – back on square one and forever in limbo. Perhaps this is the true meaning of Hard Truths, that getting out of deep-rooted habits is near on impossible. But when there has never even been a glimpse of hope or of a change, it is difficult to see the point Hard Truths is trying to make.