Hard Truths: A Tough-Watch Family Affair with the Difficult, the Damaged and the Resilient
By Liz Braun
Rating: A
Hard Truths is a film centered on a difficult, damaged human being. Watching the movie is not unlike the experience of being in the company of just such a person — uncomfortable, sobering, deeply moving.
This is one of Mike Leigh’s tougher movies. Expect no emotional quarter.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is introduced shouting with dismay as she’s awakened from a deep sleep by her husband. Her days are spent in an absolute fury of aggressive and inappropriate responses — she shouts at her beleaguered son, grouses about her neighbours, goes on the attack with salespeople and clerks, and later hollers abuse at her doctor and her dentist.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin in Hard Truths
Her conversation is like a stream-of-consciousness attack on everyone and everything around her, so extreme in its negativity and criticism that at certain points it becomes blackly comical.
What ails Pansy appears to be some combination of depression and OCD. She is afraid of nature — animals and plants — and a germophobe; her house is a sterile, over-cleaned environment, scrubbed and devoid of warmth. Pansy complains of various ailments and physical pain and often declares that she’s “a sick woman.”
All of this strange domestic unhappiness unfolds on crisp, sunny days, a clear-eyed view courtesy of cinematographer Dick Pope.
On the opposite side of all this, emotionally, is Pansy’s sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a cheerful hairdresser. Chantelle has two young adult daughters, both sunny like their mother and both fully engaged in life. They are very different from Pansy’s only son Moses, (Tuwaine Barrett), a big, silent lunk who has learned to turn a deaf ear to his mother’s endless barrage of negative commentary.
That’s not to say he has escaped its damaging effects. Moses is adrift, unemployed, living at home and physically and emotionally barricaded against the world.
Pansy reluctantly joins her sister Chantelle at their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day. Here, the women talk about their very different childhood memories and much light is shed on Pansy’s state of mind. Her sense of rejection by her mother seems to have forever convinced Pansy that she is under threat at all times and is essentially unlovable. She moves through the world like an abused dog, baring her fangs at everyone in anticipation of the next round of blows.
From the graveside, the women move to Chantelle’s house for a family lunch, but Pansy is inconsolable. She says several times that she is exhausted and sick and wants it “all to stop.” She has kept the world at bay with her armour of anger and fear, but no longer seems capable of thus protecting herself. She is spent. Pansy is in mourning, perhaps mostly for herself.
Leigh’s film quietly shows, through snippets of conversation and brief, everyday interactions, the sort of protective shield love can create in any life. Chantelle’s exuberant daughters love their mother and tease her mercilessly; Chantelle’s customers discuss potential romance in their lives, alive to possibility, to little scraps of hope and happiness.
Read our interview with Hard Truths director Mike Leigh
Hard Truths also gestures at intergenerational trauma in its contrast between Chantelle’s daughters and Pansy’s son. One intriguing scene has Chantelle’s daughter Aleisha (Sophia Brown) being tormented by her boss (Samantha Spiro) in a meeting — the boss is truly abusive. Later, when asked how her meeting went, Aleisha assures her sister that it all went well.
Denial? Self-preservation? A simple focus on the good?
Whatever it is, Aleisha is resilient. Her default setting in life is positive.
Where does that come from? Why is Pansy wired so differently?
Hard Truths is a tough watch, but you won’t be able stop thinking about it. As always, it is a rare pleasure to briefly inhabit a world created by Leigh and his cast.
Marianne Jean-Batiste has already collected a slew of awards for her extraordinary performance in this film.
Hard Truths. Written and directed by Mike Leigh. Stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, Tuwaine Barrett, David Webber. Opens January 24 in theatres in Toronto (Varsity, TIFF Lightbox), Vancouver (Fifth Avenue) and Montreal (Cinema Moderne, Cinema Public), and opens in other Canadian cities throughout the winter.