In 2008, Mike Leigh directed a film called Happy-Go-Lucy, in which Sally Hawkins plays a character so relentlessly cheery, she steadily drives everyone around her mad. Leigh’s new film, Hard Truths, feels like the antidote to that, intentional or otherwise. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a foul mood wrapped in skin and hair. She yells. She berates. She picks fights with strangers, service professionals and her own family. We sense there’s a reason for it, but when her sister asks her why she can’t enjoy life, in a rare moment of genuine self-reflection unencumbered by spite, she barks “I don’t know!”

The character may not know why she walks around the world in a constant pre-triggered state, but Leigh needs to know. It’s not clear from Hard Truths that he does. Certainly, the writer-director would not have gotten where he is, now more than 50 years into his career as an independent filmmaker, if he made a habit of neatly explicating his themes through clear moments of dramatic catharsis. But if we are waiting for Pansy to figure out the answer to her question, it will be a long wait, and we sitting on the opposite side of the screen from her may never figure it out.

Certainly, Pansy has some legitimate causes for complaint. Her husband, Curtley (David Webber), is inattentive and a little helpless, in the way that many husbands can be, though it hardly seems like a terminal case. Her 22-year-old son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), appears to have no ambitions but to sit around reading books and playing video games, and he’s got weight issues – but these too are not uncommon traits for a generation of young people who are slower to leave the nest.

The other side of her family we follow is considerably cheerier. Pansy’s sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) is a hairdresser with her own close-knit group of clientele who gossip delightfully. Her daughters Kayla and Aleisha (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown) have a similar lightness of spirit, even when Kayla flubs an advertising pitch to her boss about promoting that their product is now “coconut free.” They’ve all lost their mother and grandmother, who died five years ago, and this could have something to do with Pansy’s constant anguish, if her typically brusque reaction to visiting the gravesite is any indication. Pansy also displays symptoms of agoraphobia and unspecified health problems, which she uses as an excuse to potentially not make the visit. Then there’s the spectre of COVID, which gets mentioned a couple times as a few facemasks get donned, providing the kind of reminder of times we’ve wilfully banished from the forefront of our consciousness that cannot always be helped in a long-developing project like a film.

There isn’t much in the way of plot to Hard Truths, as it for the most part plays out as a series of toxic tete-a-tetes between Pansy and … well, everybody. Without the story doing any work dramatically, we need more from these interactions than we get. Characters only crawl very slowly along definable character arcs, so slowly that in many cases there appears to be no movement at all. The idea that people don’t or can’t change is, sometimes, a useful conclusion for a film to reach. Within that, though, there needs to be some other sort of progression for us to feel like the film is going somewhere or saying something.

Jean-Baptiste was lauded in some circles as a potential best actress nominee at the Oscars, which always seemed a little unlikely given the low profile of the film. Hers is a performance that’s hard to judge. There are moments when her craft deviates from its unending negativity, or rather, from the firmness of that negativity. There’s nary a moment of true grace for her character, so we have to grasp a sense of relief from her persona in other forms, such as the earlier mentioned moment of uncertainty about why she can’t be happy. Jean-Baptiste certainly gives the performance Leigh wanted her to give, but it’s not clear that’s what we want from her. You need to understand the causes behind a demeanour like Pansy’s, and having two slightly lame men in her life does not seem sufficient explanation.

Leigh does try to shine a light on these two men, following Moses on walks around the neighbourhood listening to music, where he is treated callously by others his age, and checking in on Curtley’s movements as a removalist alongside a chatty co-worker (Jonathan Livingstone). But Leigh comes up short of extracting something profound about the way these men live their lives, how their outlook has been poisoned by that of their wife and mother. If they are lesser because of her, that’s implied but never explored. If she is lesser because of them, that’s understandable but also incomplete. The causation seems to be circular, but that decision leaves us a little at sea.

Mike Leigh is never going to be everybody’s cup of tea. His career has always had a fault tolerance to minor misfires that result from the choice to explore certain character traits – like extreme happiness or extreme anger – that may require more solid story bones to truly emerge as complete pieces of art. Hard Truths will speak to some people who see themselves in Pansy or have a Pansy in their lives, but Pansy herself is hard enough to tolerate that it breaks the contract Leigh has with us to ultimately find grace notes in our protagonist. That’s a hard truth to swallow for anyone planning to see Leigh’s latest.

 

Hard Truths opens in cinemas today.