Thank the Cinema Gods, Mike Leigh Is Back

Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy in Mike Leigh’s new movie, Hard Truths. Photo: Bleecker Street Media

When characters in movies wake up with a sudden start, it’s usually an indication that they’ve had a nightmare. So, when we see Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the middle-aged protagonist of Mike Leigh’s marvelous Hard Truths, startle herself awake in the film’s opening scenes, we figure she too has been having a bad dream. But over the course of the picture, we come to understand that Pansy is like this every time she wakes up: She catapults herself into consciousness with a violent half-scream. The nightmare, we realize, is the world she’s waking up to, not the one she’s leaving behind.

As played by the transcendent Jean-Baptiste (who was Oscar-nominated for her role in Leigh’s 1996 hit Secrets & Lies), Pansy lives in constant fear and anxiety, which express themselves as an almost pathological hostility. She yells at her quiet, awkward adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), for going out on a walk, because she worries that he’ll be picked up for “loitering with intent.” She yells at her husband, Curtley (David Webber), for not giving the prospectless Moses a job working alongside him. At a furniture store, she yells at a random couple for putting their feet up on a sofa, then yells at the clerk for daring to help her. She gets in fights at supermarket check-out lines, first with the cashier, then with the other customers. There’s an obsessive-compulsive quality to her behavior. She furiously wipes down her couch in the mornings. She complains about half-open doors and over-filled kettles. Her home is immaculate — so clean and orderly and blank, it could be an unoccupied hotel room. She refuses to step into her empty backyard, complaining about “squirrel doodoo and rancid bird droppings.”

Pansy’s rants also happen to be hilarious, sometimes because of her observations (about fat babies and dogs with coats and why toddler clothes need pockets) and sometimes because of the creative vitriol she spews. Hard Truths might be Leigh’s funniest film in a long time, but as always, it’s the kind of laughter that comes with an unnerving feeling that something is going horribly wrong. We can think back to David Thewlis’s Johnny, the protagonist of Leigh’s Naked (1993), and his entertainingly cutting insults and millenarian monologues, which were symptoms of debilitating psychic wounds. At times Hard Truths also plays like the opposite number to Leigh’s 2008 comedy Happy Go Lucky, which featured Sally Hawkins as a relentlessly upbeat and friendly woman whose positivity ran at odds with the world around her. Here, it’s Pansy’s relentless negativity that puts her in conflict with the people surrounding her.

Beyond that, it’s clearly corroded her relationships. Moses and Curtley almost never say a word back to her. What good would it do? We get the sense that they’ve heard most of these rants before, though a few tell-tale shots suggest that Pansy’s anxiety has entered a new stage. (The film was originally set to shoot in mid-2020, and one wonders how this tale of a woman consumed with fear and rage at the outside world would have played at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.) Her younger sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser, is by contrast chatty and warm, with two vivacious daughters who don’t quite understand why their aunt is so sour. There’s family history there, to be sure, but Leigh is not one for easy explanations; he gives us slivers of backstory, hints at emotional scars. Everybody has their reasons, but the director is interested in the present, in the ways human behavior percolates out and affects others. He also looks for precise moments — those little exchanges and actions where the universe shifts forever. Leigh doesn’t always get credit for the visual power of his filmmaking, but there are several close-ups, particularly towards the end of Hard Truths, when we see on these characters’ faces a realization that nothing in their lives will ever be the same.

World premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hard Truths is Leigh’s first picture in six years, and the first one he’s made in a decade with a contemporary setting. There is at least one masterpiece among his period pieces (that would be 1999’s Topsy-Turvy), but his creative process does seem best suited for the present day: Leigh generally begins with an idea, a setting, or a situation, and then works with his actors to build their characters through exhaustive research and improvisation, eventually spinning the films’ stories up as they go along.

He’s been doing it this way for 50-plus years, and it’s produced a magnificent body of work. Leigh’s working-class characters have a specificity and shape that can only come from deep familiarity, and they resonate because they feel like variations on people we might have known. (We all probably have someone like Pansy in our lives.) But that dark edge of recognition comes with the glorious consolations of art: Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.