Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths

Whether or not he intends it to be, Hard Truths, “now premiered a few weeks into the Starmer years,” writes Asch, “will have to stand as Leigh’s comprehensive statement on the historical epoch just ended, one in which the social contract that undergirds his collaborative methods and collectivist politics was thoroughly, perhaps permanently undermined. All that has built up in the last fifteen years comes pouring out in a torrent” from Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), “an amalgam, writ large, of the small ways in which we’ve all been changed since the pandemic: haunted by death, bone-weary in her body, sick of her family, and mistrustful of strangers, no longer sure how to act in public, and perpetually at someone else’s throat.”

Pansy snaps at her layabout twenty-two-year-old son (Tuwaine Barrett), her stoically silent husband (David Webber), cashiers, furniture salespeople, and the poor guy who asks if she’s about to leave her parking spot (“Your balls are so backed up you’ve got sperm in your brain!”). Several reviewers have drawn comparisons to David Thewlis’s Johnny in Naked (1993)—his rants, though, are tinged with a bit more philosophy and the occasional conspiracy theory—and contrasts with Sally Hawkins’s Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), whose limitless optimism puts her at odds with nearly every Londoner she meets.

Pansy furiously cleans and fears leaving what Michael Sicinski describes at In Review Online as her “white middle-class interiors, IKEA furnishings, and Pottery Barn wall decor . . . Taken at face value, Hard Truths’ opening scenes could seem as if Pansy’s venom is endorsed by Leigh, the film serving as a post-Naked rant by an angry old man but placed in the mouth of one of our greatest actresses. This would be unspeakably indulgent, were it not for the fact that Hard Truths is in fact doing the exact opposite of this. Mike Leigh, one of cinema’s last great humanists, has chosen to remind us that bitterness consumes everything, and that it is impossible to love others until you find the strength to heal.”

But does Pansy get there? Her temper is “scary,” writes Jon Frosch in the Hollywood Reporter, “an explosive manifestation of pathologies both psychological (depression, anxiety, OCD) and physical (migraines, jaw pain, intestinal troubles).” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich finds that Leigh’s “faith in the root humanity of Jean-Baptiste’s performance—and in the hurt that guides it through even the broadest moments of humor—allows him to indulge in a variety of laugh-out-loud set pieces without any risk of losing Pansy to caricature.”

As Ashley Clark points out, Jean-Baptiste was the first Black British actor to be nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Secrets & Lies (1996), and for Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson, her Pansy is “dazzlingly complex, bracing work.” Jean-Baptiste “operates at high dudgeon for much of the film, and one does begin to crave new levels, to see [her] reach inward and excavate the pain burning so intensely at Pansy’s core. Leigh withholds that turn well past the point of comfort. And even when something like a break does arrive—wrenchingly manifested by Jean-Baptiste—Leigh resists neat or soothing resolution.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw notes that Hard Truths represents “a return to Leigh’s classic style, inhabiting a contemporary world shot by cinematographer Dick Pope in cold, clear London daylight, with sad family scenes and vignettes of disillusionment and quiet day-to-day courage divided by dreamy, melancholy woodwind melodies composed by Leigh’s longtime musical collaborator Gary Yershon.” Relief from Pansy’s relentless harangues comes from her hairdresser sister (Michele Austin) and her two daughters, and at the Film Stage, Ethan Vestby finds that the scenes with these three women, “which never build to dramatic crescendos of any kind but create some of the film’s only pockets of happiness, make the world of the film feel more lived in.”

For Vanity Fair, Chris Murphy delicately puts the question to Leigh that we all know many will raise, namely, whether the story of a middle-aged Black woman is an eighty-one-year-old white man’s to tell. “To put it tactically,” says Leigh, “I don’t give a monkey’s fuck about that. I really don’t. I did a play about Greek Australians. I did a play in London about Jews. I’ve made films about upper-class people. I’ve made period films about people that are really quite remote to us. I’ve certainly explored all classes of English society. Apart from anything else, what I’m doing in the film is challenging received movie notions about depicting Black people. It’s just about people. It’s about all of us in our good and less-so-good aspects.”

The AP’s Jake Coyle touches another possible sore spot, the rejections of Hard Truths from Cannes, Venice, and Telluride. “I mean,” says Leigh, “if nobody wanted it at all—it’s here (in Toronto) and at the New York Film Festival—then I’d start to twitch.” He’s already “trying to raise the money for another film,” and yes, it’s “very tough, and it’s gotten tougher.” Hard Truths has “as low a budget as I’ve had in a long time. It is reflected in the lack of complexity in the narrative. It’s fine. You cut your cloth according to its length.”

However many films Leigh has in him, we need them. “Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.”