Our truths define us. That is, what we believe to be our truths. We take what we believe to be our truths and define ourselves by them and we put our truths on others and define them by what we believe to be true.
Mike Leigh renders stark truths through character studies. His new movie is full of Hard Truths but that’s also the method of the filmmaking, the resonance of its emotional center, and the construction of the characters herein — each layer is built upon the hard truths of life.
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) has had it. She’s past her breaking point and has arrived at the next stop: angry, confrontational, and ready to tell everyone the hard truth, as she sees it. Nobody is sparred but those right in front of her will get the brunt of her ire. In her remarkably raw performance, Jean-Baptiste drills down a lifetime of generational pain, trauma, and regret, into facial expressions and acerbic cutting quips. Her work here is a masterclass character study upon which the entirety of the film rests comfortably, so realistic and assured is her performance.
In this portrayal of a black British family’s household in London, the “kitchen sink” approach is realized, if that does not undersell exactly what is happening, which is realism plus something else great films can do, which is to embody truths more real than non-fiction can do through an immaculate pairing of actor and director.
As domestic reality dramas go, Hard Truths is such a piercing interrogation of what we believe to be true and how it shapes us, that it must lead us to examine our own self-conceptions. A great movie can help us reexamine something as interpersonal as that, our relationship to our truths, how they have been formed by our family histories and our dynamics within the systems functionally belong to, but an even greater movie can do this while conveying a straightforward slice-of-drama that also succeeds along these terms.
As it goes, we find out how Pansy got to be the way she is. We see how embittered she’s become, what she has held onto, and that so much of what we believe and come to embody, are cause-and-effect results of our family, socioeconomic standing, and the result of our complete experience of life and all the moments we’ve taken to be true enough to define us.
Hard Truths is an essential character performance piece with real and hard-earned dimensions to its central character and message. This late era Mike Leigh entry finds the filmmaker completely at home with his method of deeply entrenched character study and the payoff is a rich and multifaceted approach to life in a nutshell.