Hard Truths

Consider adding Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste to that list. Their first go-round, Secrets & Lies (1996), earned them both Oscar nominations and won the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival before eventually being recognized as one of the best movies of the decade. It took the pair nearly 30 years to work together again, but the wait was worth it: Hard Truths is another nuanced character study from both the writer/director and especially his leading lady, both of whom are among their generation’s foremost talents.

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Which isn’t to say that you’ll enjoy your time with the fifty-something Pansy that Jean-Baptiste portrays, at least not in the usual sense. She is, to put it bluntly, utterly miserable from the second she wakes up (usually abruptly, as though driven to consciousness against her will) in her London home until the moment she falls asleep, and does everything in her power to ensure her misery has company. Normally that will be her long-suffering husband and son, who’ve become so inured to her ill humor as to be similarly melancholy, but there’s no interaction with a stranger too small or prosaic to prompt an utterly uncalled-for outburst. “People, can’t stand ‘em,” she sneers over dinner one night. “Cheerful, grinnin’ people.”

Pigeons appear in her yard? Day-ruining catastrophe. The checkout girl takes too long ringing her up? Harassment. But all that pain has to come from somewhere, and it’s to Leigh and Jean-Baptiste’s infinite credit that they inspire you to ponder just why Pansy is the way she is rather than roll your eyes and write her off as a lost cause. Now that Hard Truths is entering wide release after a brief awards-qualifying run last month, you’ll have the chance to do just that.

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You should take it. Jean-Baptiste is a powerhouse the likes of which you’ve rarely seen before, zeroing in on Pansy’s pain with all the precision of a sharpshooter. She’s so magnetic that Pansy’s out-of-pocket rants can’t help detouring into humor en route to yet more anger; try to listen to her complain about infant clothing (“What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it gonna keep in its pocket, a knife?”) without cracking a smile. The only one who still has the energy to even try bypassing her defenses is her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), who acts as an audience surrogate when she asks the question we’ve all been wondering: “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy’s answer is as simple as it is heartbreaking: “I don’t know.”

“Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy’s answer is as simple as it is heartbreaking: “I don’t know.”

Leigh has long specialized in just this kind of quiet profundity, with movies like Life Is Sweet and Career Girls offering such lived-in glimpses into their characters’ worlds that they give the feel of docudramas. Ostensibly modest, his films slowly gather power until feeling less like snowballs and more like avalanches. By the time the credits roll, something will have clicked without you realizing it — both in the characters and in the viewer.

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Roger Ebert’s most famous summation of movies is that they’re “like a machine that generates empathy.” Few filmmakers generate as much as Leigh, who has a soft spot for just the kind of people most other filmmakers never bother with in the first place. By the end, you might even feel the same way about Pansy that her sister does: “I don’t understand you, but I love you.”