Hard Truths

Final review of 2024!

"I don't understand you, but I love you."

Hard Truths is a welcoming return from legendary filmmaker/writer Mike Leigh.

I have no idea why this film was rejected from other festivals like Cannes and Venice because this was great. It is a depressing character piece where certain things in our past are left unresolved, and the unspoken hurt still picks away at us. Mental health issues are not just sadness and quietness but anger as well.

We follow Pansy, whose first-ever scene is her springing to wake after having a terrible dream, and from there, she is in a constant state of rage at pretty much everything. The littlest things can set her off into a rant. Her words/insults range from hilariously creative to having some truth to what she is complaining about. It mostly has to do with how people talk to her, with one example of a scene in a parking lot when another driver starts an altercation after rudely asking if she is leaving her parked space.

How about another scene where she goes to the dentist, and the woman doing the treatment talks to her in a manner that is not meant to be disrespectful and tries to ease the patient with friendliness during the process but can be seen as being treated/talked to like a child. Even Pansy says, "Don't talk to me like a child!"

But this is not a simple case of waking up cranky or having a bad day. It is something more than that. Judging by her family life, with her husband and son, they are all miserable, most noticeably her son and husband, who carry this heavy silence and hardly make eye contact. There is no love or comfort in the house.

On the other hand, Pansy's sister lives the opposite life; she is happier and has a healthy relationship with her children. Even her flat is more vibrant in colour and feels more inviting.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is terrific here, and what could have easily been a one-note performance is, instead, a devastating but exhausting performance of a woman who needs a lot of help. But she is still someone you want to avoid if you are in close contact. Even her angry outburst tires her out.

It is a very human film with beautiful writing and acting. The film shows the sad reality of how our mental health can isolate us from other people, even our own family. There is no concrete answer to why Pansy is like this. There are little crumbs of a backstory, but it is left open-ended. Situations like this are like the ocean: it is much deeper than it looks. The cinematography from Dick Pope (RIP) is subtle and nothing too flashy.

This movie and another film I saw at this festival, A Real Pain, almost feel similar in terms of a complicated family dynamic and the different lives the characters lead, where one is happier than the other.

Overall rating: The ultimate feel-bad movie of 2024.

Well, 2024 is done and dusted. I hope you all had a great year, and if not, I hope 2025 is better for you. I will see you there. Take care, everyone!

This film incisively and truthfully illustrates the trials and tribulations of mental illness, in this case ostensibly depression, and how it affects the loved ones of those afflicted. It is heartfelt, at times hilarious, and thought-provoking.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, a fitting name as she gives a vivid flowery performance, like the real-life eponymous flower, is excellent here at portraying a deeply troubled woman teetering on the brink of madness, hanging on by a thread. What could have easily fell into a caricature performance is the exact opposite: she feels so real, raw, and visceral, riding the line between sanity and insanity. She is at war with the world: the most normal petty inconveniences cause her to explode into hysterics, rage, and deep sadness; her reactions are sometimes so severe to the point she's at times unable to merely leave her bed. Michele Austin is great, playing Chantelle, the foil and sister to the lead. Where Pansy seems to be unhappy and unsuccessful, Chantelle is the opposite. Despite their differences, they support one another. And it's their sisterhood and camaraderie that functions as the film's anchor and centerpiece. The implication of their sisterhood is to drive home the point that family is key in life, a balm for the spirit. An interesting thing happens as the film furthers: the more time Pansy spends with her family, the more irritated she becomes, but it's also the more open she becomes about her feelings; it's as though her family simultaneously causes her to not only face her issues head-on, but face the reality that she does indeed have a good support network, but often fails to take advantage of it. This brings to the film an interesting dynamic. It's in these scenes with her family, particularly with her sister, that she finally lets down her tough, gruff exterior to betray a soft, mushy interior.

The film, despite at its core being a darker and moving subject matter, has many moments of welcome levity and playfulness. The comedy and gravitas meld flawlessly to make for both touching and funny viewing. The only issue this film has is that the pacing unfortunately drags rather often. As there is no real, significant plot here, besides following a middle-aged woman struggling mentally and existentially, the film feels very slice-of-life; the scenes unfurl with almost no change between when we first start the film to when we finish it. This is compounded by the dense dialogue and the secondary stories not really adding up to much ultimately, albeit the supporting characters are all good. But that is likely the conceit here: it ought to be about illustrating a snapshot of this character. Despite recognizing her issues, Pansy very well may never get better and things likely will always look this way, unfortunately similar to how life itself is for many with mental illness.

Overall, this is a great film. It's poignant, with a powerhouse central performance, unexpectedly and serendipitously humorous and diverting, and it provides a verisimilar portrait of dealing with mental illness.

There's a crisis in the family. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is ripping into everyone: husband David Webber for his choice in business partners, son Tuwaine Barrett for being twenty-two and still eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sister Michele Austin for wanting to know if she's going to be with her on Mother's Day when she goes to their mother's grave, sales clerks, doctors, dentists, the fox that's gotten in the back yard, birds. And she's scared and just wants to sleep.

By the end of this movie, I was convinced she had brain cancer that was depressing her past all bearing. But this is Mike Leigh's first movie in half a dozen years. That means you know you are going to get great performances; and Miss Jean-Baptiste certainly gives one here, not caring if anyone likes her. Most of the rest of the cast is reduced to silence, but Miss Austin keeps sweetly not taking no for an answer until she gets some answers. And those answers are as unhappy as the rest of the performance.

I can't recommend this movie to anyone who wants a story with a sense of closure one or another. But if you want to watch a human being in honest pain for an hour and a half, here's your chance.

Was this a good film? Yes. Did I like it? I'm not quite sure 'like' is the right word. There are parts which are comedic, where you feel like you shouldn't be laughing but can't help it because of the outrageous things that our protagonist Pansy spits out. But as the film goes on it becomes quite sad, like damn this is their everyday life and it's exhausting! It becomes exhausting for us too as viewers as we follow Pansy's day-to-day and witness conflict after conflict in every interaction she has. This is reinforced by the slow pace and lingering shots as we experience the characters' worlds in such painful detail. The acting is so good that makes it feel so real, almost as if I was watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Overall worth the watch. A reminder that you never know what is going on in others' lives..

"Hard Truths" is the kind of movie I think is extremely good, almost great, but that I could hardly "recommend" to anyone. It's extremely unpleasant to watch and most movie-goers will just think, "why am I inflicting this on myself"? I admit, as much as I admire the film, I understand where said movie-goer would be coming from.

Part of what makes watching "Hard Truths" so difficult is that by the standards of conventional narrative nothing "melodramatically sad" takes place. This is simply a slice of life of an exceptionally unhappy, though in no way conventionally "struggling", family. The pain the film depicts isn't brought about by an incident. It's a general reaction to the experience of life in the world. Most of us have felt this negative response to life at some point or another, and many of us have known people, like the main characters in this film, who have made choices they are scared to change that have kept them in a permanent state of misery. That is why the film feels so, well, true, but also unpalatable.

If I was trying to convince someone to watch "Hard Truths" I would compare it to a painting. The greatest portraitists create works expressing a full range of emotions in their sitters, sometimes the experience of an unexplained sadness or suffering. Yet such works are still considered beautiful and, in some sense, pleasurable to look at. Mike Leigh is a well-established dramatic master. Rarely in his career though have I sensed such an exceptional eye for detail on the director's part as in this work. Every aspect of the characters' world beautifully reflects the dreadfulness of their inner state. Their home, for instance, is, at first glance, generally pleasant but one comes to sense a fully artificial, unlived in aspect to it. It's not a home as much as a tomb for the living.

As is true with any film, this "portrait" is not the work of its director alone. In this case, the cast has an especially important part to play in accomplishing the work. Much has been written about Marianne Jean-Baptiste's lead performance as Pansy and she fully earns the encomium. David Weber and Tuwaine Barrett, as Pansy's husband and son Curtley and Moses, live up to Jean-Baptiste's firepower. This is less true of Michele Austin as Chantelle, Pansy's long-suffering sister, although I blame this less on the actress than on Leigh's only false note in the direction. The lively and boisterous home Chantelle shares with her daughters is a bit too brazenly contrasted with that of Pansy and company.

The quality of the performances both helps make the comparison to a painted portrait possible but also what ultimately makes it inadequate. The early film theorist Bela Belazs proclaimed that the most unique aspect of the cinematic frame was the way it made humanity visible as never before, especially in the form of the close-up. The film "Hard Truths" most reminded me of was Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc". It's close-ups of the weeping actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti transcend the Joan narrative and impels the viewer to wonder from what source Falconetti expresses, manifests, this angst. Viewers of "Hard Truths" enter into a similarly conjectural/ empathic relation to Jean-Baptiste. It is only this affect of the performative aspect of cinema that invites the viewer to ponder the film's central question: what is the source of Pansy's suffering, what makes people unhappy and in extension, what makes happiness possible? It is a question that the film wisely leaves unanswered, at least in any verbally expressible way.

Belazs's theory of film would seem as pure a proclamation of the metaphysics of presence as one might hope to find in the twentieth century. I am no champion of this metaphysics and would often lean on the side of its prominent critics- Derrida and company who would tend to say that reality can only be referred to through the displacement of language. I must say, however, that the ending of "Hard Truths" is a compelling argument that the most difficult truths can, and perhaps can only, be acknowledged wordlessly.