By Jeremy Carr.
Why do some people behave as they do?… It’s the psychosocial terrain explored in Mike Leigh’s latest engaging slice of life….”
All somebody has to do is spend about five minutes on social media to see that people are angry. Sometimes, the causes are obvious, widespread, and understandable. Other times, people act out and do upsetting things with no clear rationale. And we see this, of course, in our individual day-to-day reality as well. So, why do some people behave as they do? What’s going on in their lives to make them this way? What in their past might have contributed to how they conduct themselves now? We almost never get the answers to these questions, but it is a fundamental facet of contemporary human nature. It’s also the psychosocial terrain explored in Mike Leigh’s latest engaging slice of life, Hard Truths (2024).

Largely set in the sort of London-adjacent Anytown U.K. common to Leigh’s work, Hard Truths is the abbreviated story – “story” being liberally used here for what is essentially an episodic series of events – of Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) a wife, mother, sister, and aunt who is at the end of her rope. At first, she seems merely tidy and thrifty, but there’s an unspoken and quickly revealed pressure cooker of angst driving these domestic predilections. She’s quite hard on her languid and careless son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who suffers her verbal battering in silence, and is only slightly less caustic with her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), who often appears more baffled than anything. Pansy complains of assorted ailments that no doubt contribute to her unremittingly acidic behavior, but it’s never certain if these are more than psychosomatic protests (we do know she is heavily caffeinated, which probably doesn’t help).
Outside her home, Pansy is also prone to public outbursts, chiding strangers for any number of genuine or perceived infractions. She’s like an anti-Poppy, Sally Hawkins’ ebullient optimist in Leigh’s delightful Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). Sometimes, yes, people are just the worst, but Pansy levels her persistent anger at the world at large, including innocents like a grocery store cashier whom Pansy orders to “fix your face.” Also, yes, sometimes these eruptions are rather humorous. But there’s nevertheless an underlying tragedy to Pansy’s antagonistic way of life. And in either case, it’s a testament to Jean-Baptiste’s extraordinary performance that we’re captivated by Pansy all the same; occasionally, we’re even on her side. Her worries about racial targeting are well-founded (almost everyone in the film is Black) and when she mocks outfits for dogs and baby clothes with pockets (what do they put in there?), well, maybe she has a point. Still, that doesn’t belie or fully explain what’s beneath her crass exterior. Only when Pansy is alone in her car or staring idly into her yard do we get the sense of a deeper-seated existential crisis – again, thanks to Jean-Baptiste’s remarkably expressive abilities.

The only person capable of breaking through to Pansy is her jovial sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a cordial and conversant hairdresser with two vibrant daughters. Chantelle’s life is a marked contrast to Pansy’s, but she at least makes an effort to address her sister’s difficulties. It’s through their begrudging conversations that Pansy admits to being scared, lonely, unsafe, and haunted (Pansy is first seen waking from a nightmare), some of this seeming to derive from the death of their mother and the fact it was Pansy who found the corpse. Jean-Baptiste and Austin first worked with Leigh on his 1993 play It’s a Great Big Shame, also playing sisters, then reteamed for Leigh’s justifiably lauded 1996 film Secrets & Lies. Leigh has always had a way of getting the finest performances from his actors (see the aforementioned Sally Hawkins), but in Hard Truths, Jean-Baptiste and Austin are exceptional, especially because of what they bring out in the other’s character, which is a sensitive sincerity no other relationship in the film even comes close to yielding.
Leigh’s first film since his impassioned 2019 historical feature Peterloo, Hard Truths had its premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and, by comparison to that previous film, it is a more pointedly intimate portrait with considerably more ambiguity (the “bad guys” and “good guys” are unmistakable in Peterloo). Like Peterloo, though, Hard Truths also had Dick Pope as its cinematographer. A longtime Leigh ally, Pope passed away just after Hard Truths was released, but it’s a suitable sendoff as, like their prior collaborations, Pope is again able to illustrate Leigh’s penchant for casually gripping naturalism. Leigh has rarely been a showy director, but with Pope at his side, his camera has always been just where it needed to be. This holds for Hard Truths, where there is an objective visual stance that reinforces Leigh’s signature humanism and his capacity for complex compassion, with emotions subtly seeping into compelling scenes or even single frames (one of Hard Truths’ rare, happier moments is completely wordless and shot from a fair distance).

In this, and in the authenticity of his characterizations, Leigh has again presented a film with working-class universality. Of particular note in Hard Truths is its present-day context. COVID is only mentioned in passing, and Leigh has argued the film could be taking place at any point in time, but the impact of the pandemic is too apparent to ignore. In a figurative sense, the bitterness that stems from Pansy has the potential of spreading to her victims, particularly her son and husband, who are frequently seen in the wake of one of her tirades – how has her fury been affecting, or infecting, them? In a more literal sense, Pansy appears to embody the lingering anxiety that was exacerbated by, if not born from, the global health crisis. She agonizes personally but also exemplifies a world where people forgot how to behave, especially in public.
A tipping point, which throughout seems inevitable, comes near the very end of Hard Truths, though it’s likely not as expected and isn’t as severe as it could have been. The ultimate conclusion of the picture also isn’t anticipated. It works, though, and recalls Robert Altman’s comment about his films not necessarily ending, but simply reaching a stopping point. People like Pansy will always be around, and they’ll remain something of a mystery to most. “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” says one of Chantelle’s customers. “Because I don’t show it.” Well, Pansy shows it, at least some of it. Yet so much more remains hidden; the “why?” mentioned above is still mostly intact, as is, now, the question of what happens next. Another filmmaker also comes to mind while watching Leigh’s work: Jean Renoir, specifically his 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game, which gave us the famous quote – easily applied to Hard Truths – “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.” Hard truths indeed.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor. He is the author of Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and Kubrick and Control from Liverpool University Press a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Something Wicked: Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture, from Bloomsbury Academic.