Hard Truths Review
Hard Truths (2024) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Mike Leigh and starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Jo Martin, Samantha Spiro, Bryony Miller, Sophia Brown, Ashna Rabheru, Donna Banya, Jonathan Livingstone, Tiwa Lade, Hiral Varsani and Elliot Edusah.
Renowned filmmaker Mike Leigh (1996’s Secrets & Lies)’s latest, Hard Truths, in its opening scenes, may be hard to take for a while until it becomes unbelievably funny thanks to the perfect work of the movie’s star, the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste. She portrays an aging woman named Pansy who says she’s sick by her own declaration at one point in the picture. She has a headache and goes to the doctor only the doctor’s away for a funeral. Someone is covering for him. Pansy wonders aloud why the usual doctor isn’t there for his living patients. Whoever died can’t be helped anyway, right? If you can understand the way Pansy thinks, you will love Hard Truths. If you don’t even try to get her, you may hate this movie.
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Jean-Baptiste is everything that works so well in Hard Truthsand that’s why the movie sort of slightly fails her in the end by giving her character a chance to stop running her trap. The reason she is so outspoken is hard to decipher, exactly, but Pansy is sort of fed up. She’s mad as hell and she’s not going to take anyone’s crap. Her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), sits on his butt in the house all day which makes Pansy livid that he’s wasting his life. She demands to know why he has toilet paper in his bedroom. Pansy thinks, “What the heck would he need that for?” The humor in all of Jean-Baptiste’s line deliveries is balanced with moments of sensitivity such as when Pansy goes to visit her mom’s grave with her sister, Chantal (Michele Austin). There’s a beating heart inside Pansy that has a lot of love in it but those types of feelings have been suppressed for whatever reason.
When Pansy goes to the supermarket, she ends up getting into an argument with people. At the dentist (Hiral Varsani)’s office, Pansy complains that she’s not being treated correctly. Pansy has a lot of gripes with people and they all derive from a certain level of dissatisfaction with the hand of cards that she has been dealt with in her life.
Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin (as the slightly happier sister) play off each other like masters of the acting game. The improvisation techniques that Mike Leigh uses suit these characters well. They also give Jean-Baptiste the chance to embrace her wild and creative side which makes the movie such a success.
David Webber is Curtley, Pansy’s husband who takes a heavy bathtub down the stairs and feels pain in his body in one of the film’s last scenes. Webber is fantastic as he starts to see that he can’t win when it comes to pleasing Pansy. The last scene of the film is completely unexpected as we’re used to seeing Pansy have an answer for everything. By the film’s end, she realizes that she doesn’t have the answers to everything. Not even close. The late, great cinematographer Dick Pope ends the movie with a compelling shot and each scene throughout the movie is carefully crafted to convey a certain level of dissatisfaction in terms of the lead character’s existence. Pansy often commands the screen with her larger than life presence. A late shot where Pansy’s son meets someone who offers him a snack doesn’t have dialogue but Pope (and Leigh) get it just right.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste is at the very top of her game. She almost single-handedly carries the movie on her shoulders for virtually its entire running time. While I wanted to see her change, the way Jean-Baptiste plays the role suggests she never could change. After all, how easy is it to teach an old dog new tricks, anyway? Pansy thrives in her misery and takes down anyone who stands in the way of her fulfilling her goals. An argument with a stranger has a hilarious resolve in the dialogue exchange that must be heard to be appreciated. The ending cuts the movie shorter than I would have liked it to and Pansy seems like the type who could never really be silenced so the ending is a surprise. But, it’s still a solid film overall.
Hard Truths offers plenty of Mike Leigh’s unique film-making techniques to inspire laughter at certain intervals in the early section of the picture. At one point, it’s almost impossible not to laugh as the serious Pansy keeps going on and complaining. She’s like the opinionated character Al Pacino played in Scent of a Woman, only much grumpier, if you can imagine that.
Will Marianne Jean-Baptiste get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for Hard Truths? The hard truth in this very competitive year for actresses is “yes.” A performance like this is rare in cinema. It’s one of the grand turns of this decade. In conveying Pansy’s pains and frustrations, the viewer ends up realizing that many people are just like Pansy at certain points in their lives. The fact that she could be a sort of “every woman” is the scariest revelation of Jean-Baptiste’s wonderful work. But, then Leigh lets us know that Pansy has a heart. It’s just been suppressed due to all the baloney she has to deal with on a daily basis. Hard Truths doesn’t pull any punches and it’s a better film as a result.
Rating: 8/10
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