I hated Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s insufferable character Pansy in the first five minutes of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. That’s okay. He wants us to hate her. But he also wants us to wonder about her and what it is that drives her to be so miserable, a plague on anything good and decent, the human embodiment of doom scrolling. Leigh’s films often focus on singularly annoying figures who practically exist in a world outside of our own. Think Sally Hawkins’ eternally cheerful Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky. Pansy would be her archnemesis if this were a comic book universe. Pansy is so miserable, so caustic, a vacuum sucking the joy out of everything, that our natural instinct is to turn the movie off and not spend any more time with this person.
That would be a mistake. Hard Truths is brilliant, another insightful character piece from Leigh who somehow makes us feel something other than resentment towards Pansy. The first time we hear the London housewife go on a ripper of a rant, she’s on everything from people who are too happy, to babies with too many pockets in their clothes, to dogs wearing sweaters. Her husband Curtley (David Webber) and 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Bennett) have had any shred of happiness razed by Pansy’s constant barrage of complaints, insults, and humiliation. The dinner table might as well be a morgue. Nobody is spared of her vitriol. A salesperson at a furniture takes the full brunt of her assault; a lady in the supermarket checkout line; her dentist; and her doctor who she insultingly calls a “mouse with glasses” for having the temerity to try and help diagnose Pansy’s constant pain. She calls Curtley’s jovial co-worker Virgil a mute, implying he’s some kind of weirdo. But Virgil is actually a motormouth who has cottoned to the fact it’s not wise to say much when Pansy’s around. Why make yourself a target of her assault?
And that’s the thing about Pansy; we know she’s in pain. She won’t let anyone hear the end of it. She’s also deeply afraid…of everything. She fears bugs, birds, her own backyard, but most of all she fears confrontation because it forces her to look inward. When the furniture salesperson goes to get her manager, Pansy scurries out of the store like a scalded dog. Leigh, always so good at gauging how much information to dish out and when, tells us little bits of Pansy’s backstory. It’s just enough to make her feel like a real person, but not enough to ask us to feel sorry for her. That’s one thing Leigh has never done in any of his films about, well, let’s just call them “difficult” people. Emotional manipulation isn’t in his playbook.
Hard Truths is full of people who complain. That’s not the issue. Complaining itself isn’t the problem. Life throws a lot of tough shit at everyone, it’s how you let it affect you and the way you treat others that proves what kind of person you are. Proving that point is Pansy’s younger sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who is the ray of sunshine to Pansy’s raincloud. Chantelle listens to her customers laugh and gossip through their hardships every day. They take it all in stride and so does Chantelle, who has her share of problems, too. She wishes her sister could do the same thing. When Chantelle basically strongarms Pansy into going to visit their mother’s grave, Pansy can’t even be civil then. We learn that Pansy basically had to raise Chantelle due to their mother’s irresponsibility, which suggests that a bit of envy is at the heart of her pain. The worst part about it is that Pansy knows how miserable she makes others feel, and she just doesn’t know how to stop it. Nor does she know how to let others help her. It’s like she’s trapped in a prison of her own mind with no way out.
“I’m so tired”, Pansy frequently says, and we get it. She seems so done with everything; done with feeling terrible, done with being angry, done with hating herself, done with Curtley who expects to be waited on hand and foot. Chantelle has two daughters of her own, both as spirited as she is. When Pansy and Chantelle’s families gather for a get-together, we see just how different both sides are. We also see just how lonely Pansy is, even among a group of people who love her.
Jean-Baptiste has been an incredible actress for so long that I think we have taken her for granted. We’re so accustomed to seeing her in supporting roles, or on television, that we forget what a powerful lead actress she can be. This is the best part she’s had since her Best Supporting Actress nomination for Leigh’s Secrets & Lies in 1996, and it’s likely to get her another Oscar nom in the Best Actress category this time. Leigh and Jean-Baptiste are able to do something pretty extraordinary with Hard Truths and it’s to make us defy our natural instinct to run away from this movie and Pansy, and by the end of it we just want to give her a big hug and tell her everything will be okay.
Hard Truths is open in theaters now courtesy of Bleecker Street.
