'Hard Truths' Review: Marianne Jean-Baptiste Makes Magic Happen
Mike Leigh's latest is a tragicomic look into post-COVID anxiety and trauma
Mike Leigh gives you people as they are. He shows you the messy, happy, sad people of the world and compels you to look underneath all that to discover the why. Why do they act the way they do? Why do they make the choices they make? His latest film, Hard Truths, plops the audience right into the middle of the world today, this very minute practically, and shows us how people are living in a landscape where a pandemic has destroyed our sense of safety, although it’s just one in sea of issues that have made us feel scared to leave the confines of our house.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is an extremely unhappy housewife who spends her days criticizing her family and everyone else around her. It’s a stark contrast from her sister, Chantal (Michele Austin), who lives a quiet, happy life with her two daughters. The two sisters are forced to come together over one Mother’s Day weekend, leading to a floodgate of repressed emotions eventually being unleashed.
It’s remarkable how quickly Hard Truths moves considering it lacks a conventional plot. We meet Pansy enacting a scene she presumably makes every day: jumping up and checking the windows outside at the slightest sound. It could be a bird, a person, a fox, but she must investigate it. Her grown son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) and husband Curtley (David Webber) live in perpetual silence, when they aren’t trying to leave the house to have some human interaction that isn’t the surly Pansy. But even that’s a challenge, as Pansy questions where Moses goes every day — he’s 22 and lacks a job and any sense of motivation — and reminds him that, as a Black man, he’s at risk for being arrested the moment he walks outside.
It’s not that Pansy’s wrong, but the way she goes about telling people things is generally harsh and abrasive. One minute the audience is laughing at her questioning why a baby is wearing a dress “with pockets” and another they’re cringing at her berating a furniture employee for asking if they can be of assistance.
In the hands of any other actress watching a character like Pansy for 97 minutes would be torturous. But the strength of Jean-Baptiste’s performance is that the audience understands the roiling emotions that she, as the character, is trying to contain. Pansy is clearly a woman affected not only by the last several years, but unresolved grief over the death of her mother and the belief that her sister was more beloved.
Spread over the series of a few days we watch Pansy, and Jean-Baptiste, go from simmering to a full roiling boil, but in a way that always feels organic. Pansy’s life of quiet and servitude to her husband and son is contrasted with that of Chantal, a hairdresser who’s life is filled with laughter. But even she and her daughters deal with the various microaggressions of white people.
Where Pansy is constantly on edge, Chantal’s daughter Kayla (Ani Nelson) experiences a boss who critiques her ideas and expresses her disappointment, while simultaneously saying she’s “proud” of her. Leigh’s script, more than anything, takes the time to say the obvious: people have been collectively traumatized yes, but the fatigue of being a Black person in the world is on a whole other level.
Jean-Baptiste, long an actress who should have her flowers already, is the reason Hard Truths works so well. But she’s surrounded by equally talented performers giving highly individualized performances, whether that’s Austin’s gregarious Chantal who is hiding her ow inner sadness in order to keep positive. Or there’s Barrett as the quiet, childlike Moses. Though he’s a giant of a man, the constant criticism from his mother has caused him to self-sabotage his life, miring himself in a constant depression. And that’s really what Leigh gets at: the chronic depressions of just existing as a person of color in today’s time.
Hard Truths lives up to its title and is a fabulous leading role for Marianne Jean-Baptiste. For those who have avoided Mike Leigh’s work for being too dour this might have the balance of levity to realism that you’re seeking.