In 'Hard Truths,' you love to watch Marianne Jean-Baptiste hate
Mike Leigh's comedy about misery is one of the best movies of 2024
Pansy Deacon is hateful, vituperative, brusque, and cruel. She spews insults at family and strangers alike. (But not friends. She doesn’t have any.) She is a master of the putdown. To Pansy, everyone is stupid, incompetent, terrible, and beneath her – particularly her son and her husband. Despite what seems like a pretty comfortable middle class existence, Pansy’s world is one big horror show – imagined dangers and perceived slights abound. Everyday just might be the worst day of her life. She says she’s sick, though there doesn’t seem to be anything (physically) wrong with her. She sucks up all the air in the room and makes everyone who encounters her as miserable as she is. She is also one of the most spectacular cinematic creations I’ve ever seen.
Because she is played by the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste in a Mike Leigh movie, you love to watch Pansy hate. She’s the protagonist of “Hard Truths,” which is probably Leigh’s funniest film. Leigh isn’t typically known for his humor, he’s known for the way he captures the bleakness of reality. There’s plenty of that here. You wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of Pansy’s excoriations. (Trust me. There are shades of my mother in this character. I’ll just say that we’ve been estranged for about 15 years and let you draw your own conclusions.) But watching people be nasty on screen can be great fun, and the way Pansy nags her husband and son, degrades just about every single person she comes across, and repeatedly blows her stack is deliciously entertaining.
I’ve already forgotten many of Pansy’s best barbs because there are so many of them. A woman behind her in line at the supermarket is “an ostrich.” (She kind of does resemble one.) A nurse Pansy dresses down for a litany of imagined inadequacies is “a mouse.” (They don’t even make it out of the waiting room before Pansy goes off on her.) An impatient man in a parking lot with whom Pansy escalates an argument in marvelous fashion is told he gets so little sex his “brain is backed up with semen.” The library is open, and Pansy is reading everyone to filth.
But as wickedly humorous as “Hard Truths” can be, it’s a movie of tremendous empathy for someone who might euphemistically be called “a difficult person.” In spite of all of her awfulness, Pansy, as her name might suggest, is as delicate as a flower. She’s always alone, even when surrounded by her family. Her past haunts her. Her pain constantly simmers beneath the surface, bubbling up with no warning. She can’t control her emotions at all. A therapist would probably diagnose her with Borderline Personality Disorder. Likely some clinical narcissism as well. But Pansy doesn’t appear to be the self aware type. You might not much like Pansy, but as created by Jean-Baptiste (Leigh’s movies are written in collaboration with his actors), you have great compassion for her. Her pain is real, and it’s ruining everyone’s lives.
Pansy lives in a tidy working class suburb of London in a house she shares with her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber, and their adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Unlike the other houses on the street, the Deacon house has no trees in the front yard, just concrete. The backyard, a sad looking patch of grass, is equally as desolate. You get the impression Pansy has never walked out the glass doors leading there. In addition to people, Pansy also can’t stand mammals, birds, insects, trees, and the germs she presumes come with them. At one point she sees a fox in the yard and becomes totally unnerved.
The inside of the house is about as personal as an Ikea. The walls and the furniture are grey. You won’t spot art anywhere. There certainly aren’t any family photos. The Deacons don’t seem like they’ve ever taken one. Everything is immaculately spotless to the point of being antiseptic. You can practically smell the bleach. When we first meet Pansy, she’s spraying cleaner on a leather couch. You get the sense she does this every day. The house would be her sanctuary, but she has to share it with her two greatest disappointments, Moses and Curtley.
When we first meet Moses, Pansy asks him to put the kettle on. (“Just one cup! Not eight! I don’t like to waste,” she shouts at him, immediately telegraphing her resentment and disdain.) Moses makes me recall something a therapist once told me about people who live with a lot of trauma. Life can be a kettle on a hot stove. Reach out and get burned enough times, you’ll learn to stop trying. With a mother like Pansy, you know Moses has been burned again and again.
Moses is a 22 year old who, despite his hulking size, is much closer to a little boy than a man. He’s jobless and lives in his childhood bedroom, which is strewn with candy wrappers and empty bottles. He plays with toy planes, pages through a children’s book about aviation, and spends a great deal of time in front of a flight simulator game. It’s a rather blunt but effective motif. The boy who yearns to fly can’t get off the ground. He’s heartbreaking.
A less humane movie would portray Moses as some sort of incel. Barrett plays him as a husk of a person, someone who has been yelled at and ridiculed by his mother every time he opened his mouth, until he learned not to have anything to say at all. Moses wears the same hoodie everyday. His large frame is almost like a turtle’s shell he can retreat inside. His only solace are his daily, meandering walks. Some boys from the neighborhood, whose asses he could easily kick, harass him, calling him “Chunks.” He just takes it. He’s had lots of practice at home. (I have a Moses in my family, too.)
Moses isn’t the only one. His father Curtley (another Dickinsian name), moves through the world with the weariness of someone stuck in a long term loveless marriage. He tries to speak as little as he can, oscillating between trying not to piss off his wife and ignoring her entirely. Webber’s beaten down performance is almost all internal. Curtley has learned to stay out of Pansy’s way. He rushes to a shack in the backyard when he gets home after work to avoid her. If he ever had any spark in him, life with Pansy stamped it all out long ago. There’s only room for one person in this family of three.
All of this is contrasted with Pansy’s vivacious younger sister, Chantelle. Jean-Baptiste has rightly been getting a lot of attention for “Hard Truths,” but Michele Austin as Chantelle gives an equally brilliant and complex performance. Austin and Jean-Baptiste last shared the screen together when they collaborated with Leigh on his masterpiece “Secrets and Lies” nearly 30 years ago. In that movie, they played best friends. In “Hard Truths” Chantelle may be Pansy’s sister, but she’s also Pansy’s punching bag and the target of her envy.
Everything about these women are polar opposites. Chantelle’s apartment is colorful, lively, and full of plants (which terrify Pansy, because they’re “filled with insects”). Whereas the Deacons sit in total silence when Pansy isn’t raging, Chantelle’s home is filled with love, laughter, and affection. It’s sweet watching Chantelle cuddle on the couch joking around with her two adult daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson), after they’ve spent a night out. The girls are about Moses’s age, but they’re beautiful, vibrant, and have good jobs. Though Leigh, ever a realist, shows us that neither young woman is exactly satisfied or appreciated at work. But while Chantelle, her daughters, and the women who get their hair braided by Chantelle at her salon aren’t necessarily happy, none of them are unhappy about it.
Those kinds of characters – middle class Brits who aren’t happy, but not necessarily unhappy about it – populate Leigh’s contemporarily set films alongside some of the most miserable human beings of all time. (He’s also made some historic epics in recent years, like “Mr. Turner,” a beautiful two and a half hour long movie about an old man with a cough, and “Peterloo,” which I haven’t seen, but despite its pervy sounding name, is not about sucking dick at a gloryhole in a British restroom.) While Black actors have occasionally appeared in his work (most notably in “Secrets and Lies”), Leigh has mostly told stories about white people. “Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first movie to feature an almost entirely Black cast, the majority of whom are of Jamaican descent. I can’t speak to the authenticity of how Leigh portrays working class Jamaican Londoners. (I do, however, have enough Jamaican friends to know that Pansy’s obsession with cleaning is shared by many Jamaican mothers.) But while women (and men) like Pansy exist in all cultures, I can’t imagine “Hard Truths” taking place in another community. The specificity of their world only makes everything feel more lifelike.
As “Hard Truths” enters its final act, Pansy’s abuse starts to feel less funny and more tragic, both for us and those around her. One of the hardest parts about mental illness is how everyone else around the mentally ill person must deal with it, live with it. That’s a hard truth, indeed. Another is that sometimes you might love a family member, but loathe everything about them. Pansy’s misanthropy causes an inflection point in her marriage, one with consequences. She and Curtley realizing they’re stuck in this cycle might be this movie’s hardest truth of all.
“Hard Truths” is now playing in theaters.
