‘Hard Truths’ Review: Marianne Jean-Baptiste Reunites With Mike Leigh And The Results Are As Bleak As You Might Guess – Toronto Film Festival

Pete Hammond
·4 min read

Right at the end credits of Hard Truths it says “any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” I am not sure that is so true. I know many people who are just as mad at the world for various reasons as Pansy, the main character in Mike Leigh’s latest depressing look at working class day-to-day existence in Great Britain. We’ve been here in this bleak zone many times with Leigh, and in fact this is the second time the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste has worked with him, the first being her Oscar-nominated performance in his 1996 classic Secrets and Lies. She was unforgettable then, and she remains unforgettable now, albeit playing a thoroughly unlikable character in Pansy, a woman who somewhere along the way lost any sense of joy, if indeed she ever had any.

Pansy is a real pip if ever there was one. Leigh workshops his scripts, mostly with improv with his actors over a six-month period in which they jointly develop where the characters are going. I can’t imagine what this was like for Jean-Baptiste to live with the reprehensible woman for as long as she had to live with her. Here is a person for whom nothing is good enough. Her poor husband Curtley (David Webber) can do no right, not even walk through the living room with his shoes on. Her videogame-obsessed son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) has clearly shut off the world in order to avoid his mother.

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At the beauty parlor where her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) works she is also impossible, just as Chantelle, a polar opposite with two lovely daughters, appears to be the only person on the planet who has an ounce of empathy for her. A visit to the supermarket ends in conflict with the clerk. Her appointment with the dentist is impossible since she will not let him do his job; only she knows what is wrong. It is the same with all that ails her. And god help the saleslady trying to help her pick out a new couch. It goes on and on. “People! Can’t stand ’em,” she says.

There is something terribly wrong with Pansy, and a certain predictability that we will eventually find out what made her so repulsive. I can assure we do get that but it is very late in the game and has to do somehow with her late mother. Basically this is all played out as a chamber piece. Curtley has few words to say at this point in their marriage, and you wonder where the attraction might have once been. Webber’s performance is the most heartbreaking to me because he just can no longer get through to his wife — she has shut him out. This is an actor whose eyes tell you all you need to know. When they go to Michele’s flat for a holiday gathering the silence from him is deafening, the tension unbearable.

Is Leigh interested in giving any sense of hope to these people? You can decide. He does offer a little, but it really is such a pittance that it doesn’t register. This is a bleak look at a bleak person with no way out of herself. Sad.

Jean-Baptiste carries the film on her shoulders and she is magnificent. If you want to watch acting of the highest order look no further, but if you want to invest in a character worth spending 97 minutes with look somewhere else. It is somehow appropriate that a company called Bleecker Street is distributing this film. When the answer, such as it is, finally comes as to why Pansy is Pansy it still seems there are more questions that anything else. That is the real hard truth.

Producer is Georgina Lowe.

Title: Hard Truths
Festival: Toronto (Special Presentations)
Distributor: Bleecker Street
Release date: December 6, 2024 (NY); January 10, 2025 (wider)
Director-screenwriter: Mike Leigh
Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 37 mins

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