When Pansy awakes with a start early on in veteran director Mike Leigh’s new film Hard Truths, we get a close-up of her face tensed into a mask of confusion and anxiety. Her face looks so familiar, we swear we know her, that we’ve seen her in countless other movies.
We have this feeling because even though we may have seen this middle-aged woman’s face before, the look she captures is the frustrating desperation of acute trauma and grief, and we all know something about that.
The somber notes of Gary Yershon’s low jazzy score set the mood for this story as it softly moans and wails in the morning London suburbs.
Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Topsy Turvy), whose style is characterized as Social Realism or Kitchen Sink Realism, centers this film around average working-class people: the Deacons, a Black English family. The father is a plumber and the mother is currently unemployed, as is their 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett from You Don’t Know Me) who spends his time in a daze taking walks, dreaming or reading about airplanes, playing video games, and listening to music. We are slowly introduced to their particular disfunction and the circumstances that are destroying them.
We are all familiar with variations of the tired old adage ‘Time heals all wounds,’ and in many subtle ways, ‘Hard Truths’ really asks hard questions about the nature of healing and grief.”
Our lead character, Pansy, is played so convincingly by the skilled and experienced Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) at times we forget we are watching a film. It is billed as comedy/drama, though it leans much more into drama/tragedy, and Pansy is the epicenter of that conceit.
We quickly realize that though her behavior is borderline sociopathic, she’s something of a misanthrope by way of trauma and loss. The comedy of her character is questionable, but it’s comparable to Larry David’s character in Curb Your Enthusiasm. She walks through her life yelling at and demeaning her large gentle son, or hassling doctors, clerks, and cashiers in offices and shops around town, or getting into a bitter and mean-spirited argument with a stranger over a parking spot.
While these interactions appear humorous on the surface, they reveal the deep anger, bitterness, and melancholy confusion within. As we come to know her, we are unsure whether we should despise her or feel a deep empathy for her.
Pansy’s relentless hostility and negativity are balanced by her younger sister Chantelle’s persistent optimism and disciplined hopefulness. Chantelle (Michele Austin from Secrets & Lies) works as a hairdresser, and instantly we see the contrast: she’s patient, empathetic, and a good listener. She seems to have taken her grief in and converted it to hope instead of the social nihilism that her sister creates.
The unexpected death of their mother five years earlier seems to be what has caused Pansy’s current crisis, and Pansy was the one who found her dead. We also learn of the difficult relationship Pansy had with her mother growing up taking care of her sister after their father was gone. In these two women, we see two radically different ways people can react to grief and loss. Chantelle embraces hope and moves on, while Pansy loses herself in confusion and anger (exhausting to anyone), repeating “I’m tired, I’m so tired” in honest moments.
Pansy yells at her husband and insults him, trapping him in no-win situations like telling him to cook his own dinner. When Curtley (David Webber from Captain Phillips) orders take-out fried chicken for himself and Moses, she reappears yelling that he knows she hates that chicken, and then demanding if he got anything for her.
Curtley is almost completely expressionless, walking through his life with a look of emotional pain on his face. He is silent and goes about his daily routine mechanically, seemingly having given up trying to understand his estranged wife.
Moses is a portrait of a grief-traumatized young man. Aside from his fascination with airplanes and video games, he spends the majority of his days on long walks around London wearing his headphones with a blank expression on his face. He would’ve been 17 when his grandmother died, and he too has become trapped in Pansy’s net of grief. When asked by his well-adjusted cousins where he goes on his walks, he answers, “anywhere.”
A poignant scene that involves Pansy, Curtley, and Moses centers on his gift of flowers to Pansy for Mother’s Day, which though well-intentioned, brings more chaos and pain to the family, and Curtley tosses the bouquet into the back yard.
We are all familiar with variations of the tired old adage “Time heals all wounds,” and in many subtle ways, Hard Truths really asks hard questions about the nature of healing and grief. Is the old adage always true? How much time does it take? How will we know? These mental meanderings are supplemented in the film by Curtley’s work partner Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone from The Witches), who is the working-class philosopher of time. “You can’t sell time; you can’t buy it either.” He tells us strange truths; for example, Big Ben, the largest clock in the world, is now Elizabeth, but it’s always been the bell inside that’s been Big Ben. He tells of a woman who would set her watch by the Greenwich clock and go around London selling the correct time of day or night to busy Londoners.
But to Pansy, Curtley, and Moses, time has become an endless maze-like prison, and what Virgil leaves unsaid is that time cannot be regained.
‘Hard Truths’ gives an objective examination of unchecked grief wreaking devastation on all family members.”
Leigh’s direction calls for careful viewing of the film, especially after the peak of the action in a cemetery where Pansy confesses, “I don’t know. I’m haunted. I’m haunted. It’s not fair!” During a tense confrontation between the two sisters, a ghostly procession of black-clad motorcyclists glides by among the tombstones complete with a sidecar hearse labeled “DAD.” Everyone loses parents.
When they return to Chantelle’s flat and Pansy stubbornly takes the stairs, we get a location shot of her on the stairs behind a row of vertical bars, succinctly capturing her imprisonment. Seemingly unrelated scenes take on a strange significance in the story. A fox shows up in the back yard and Pansy goes completely hysterical. The cute fox, head down and tail drooping behind, sadly wanders out of the action; Pansy’s suffering dims even the wonders of the natural world.
The plot may seem loose and unstructured at times, but there are clear demarcations, and its apparently static nature at least alludes to progress. At day’s end a helmeted Virgil, the blue-collar metaphysician of time, can be seen riding off on his bicycle, and we recall him riding up on it and dismounting at the very beginning of the film.
In a most unexpected way we also see hope for Moses, involving licorice offerings and a pretty young woman. Curtley injures himself carrying an old tub downstairs with Virgil, and we hope if any good can come from his painful back injury, it may be that Pansy begins to understand that she’s needed by others—by her husband, whose final frame shows a single tear of pain run down his cheek.
In the end, Pansy is startled awake by Virgil, that man of time, who delivers the news about Curtley. Pansy stares forward; perhaps she can now acknowledge the suffering others, and there is hope that this could force her to come to terms with her own suffering.
Hard Truths gives an objective examination of unchecked grief wreaking devastation on all family members.
Editor’s Note: Hard Truths is now playing at The SLO Film Center at the Palm Theatre.