Hard Truths 2024

Another marvelous chamber piece from the great director Mike Leigh focusing on ordinary lives lived out and around In London. The ordinary lives of “Hard Truths” are two sisters, one light and happy, the other dark and miserable. Our time is mainly spent with the dark and miserable one played to perfection by the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste who lives a desperate life with her sad plumber of a husband and her overweight sad downtrodden 22 year old son who spends most of his time in his bedroom headphones on, reading young adult and children books on airplanes and fondling his plastic airplane models. When he's not isolating himself he takes long lonely walks head down sometimes being accosted by local neighborhood bullies. They live in a nice neat but sterile and unfeeling house in a Caribbean neighborhood somewhere in London. The film opens with Marianne whose name is Pansy waking up from sleep and letting out a piercing scream. This might be the background sound of the film.

She is a tortured soul, nasty and complaining about everything and her day consists of errands that end in hostile confrontations with anyone who is unfortunate enough to cross her path including store clerks, doctors and dentists and of course her poor husband and son not to mention her sweet hairdresser sister played by Michele Austin who loves her but is torn by her erratic and terrible behavior. I didn't know whether to laugh (indeed some of her confrontations are so horrible and outrageous that I did indeed laugh at some of them, shame on me) or cringe.

Her sister is the complete opposite of Pansy, kind loving, fun to be around and a cherished mom whose two grown up daughters live with her and behave more like friends than mother and daughters. Pansy is especially nasty to her husband played with sorrow and defeat by David Webber and their poor son Moses who is the brunt of most of Pansy's anger. It's hard to watch. Her behavior is so appalling and gross that I found myself hating her for most of the film's running time.

The shank of the film resolves around two events: mothers day and a visit by the two sisters to their mother's grave which fills in some details of the sadness of Pansy's life. But Leigh doesn't let us off easily, he doesn't give us any resolves or resolutions no happy fade-outs or easy truths here. Baptiste is brilliant and should have gotten another Oscar nomination for her performance to go with her supporting actress nomination she received for “Secrets and Lies” another great family drama many moons ago.

This is Leigh's first film that focuses on the lives of black families and he brings the same complex direction and attention that all of his previous films have. I've seen all of his movies except for “Peterloo”from 2018 due to no fault of my own since it is nowhere to be found either on dvd or streaming that I know of.

He works on his films over long periods of time, allowing his cast to find their own paths and this gives his films a spontaneous feel. They almost feel improvised and immediate and most of his films have sometimes embarrassing and awkward family gatherings including “Hard Truths. His long years of working with a steady group of actors also helps to bring comfort and joy to his stories and they make up a who's who of great British actors including Imelda Staunton, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, David Thewlis,Brenda Blethyn, Alison Steadman (who he was married to for a time) Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan, many of whom have appeared over and over in his films.

He also broke away from small to large in two magnificent films one about the theater and the other about the life of an artist. The great 1999 epic story of Gilbert and Sullivan “Topsy Turvy” and the equally magnificent 2014 “Mr. Turner” about the great 19^th century painter J.M.W. Turner, are both to my mind arguably the best films ever done on the theater and the life of an artist. Both are expansive, rich with characters and compelling in plot and both are gorgeous to look at.