Like many of Mike Leigh’s films, Hard Truths is both extremely well-done and tormenting to watch. It always surprises me that Leigh’s cinematic portraits of British working-class life are often considered to be quite funny in a bleak sort of way. Hard Truths, for example, is generating laughs for the quality of insults cast by the main character, Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who is in a compulsive and perpetual rage at life, spewing abuse at family members as well as any unfortunate neighbor or service person or total stranger who happens to cross her path.
I couldn’t laugh at any of it. Even while recognizing the quality of the filmmaking, my response is more like that of Pansy’s husband, Curtley (David Webber), or her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who sit in a numb state of endurance under the lash of her fury, waiting for their chance to escape.
It all depends, I guess, on your own experience in relation to deeply scarred families of the working class. If you’ve been in one, it’s tough to laugh. In order to find it funny, you’d probably need a filmmaker who’s a lot wittier in a gallows-humor sort of way than Leigh tends to be. Just Pansy shouting, “You look like an ostrich!” to a tall young woman who tries to intercede when Pansy begins to abuse a checkout clerk for no apparent reason isn’t going to do it.
Hard Truths begins and ends with the same shot of a nice middle-class house in the suburbs where this in-depth study of one disturbed black family will take place. It’s Pansy’s house, and the repetition of that shot closes you with a dreadful, implacable sense of stasis. It would take a miracle to change the grim family dynamic enclosed in that house.
Pansy’s husband, Curtley, is a plumber who owns his own business and is clearly successful enough that neither Pansy or Moses, an apathetic and overweight young man of twenty-two, has to work for a living. The house is kept so shining clean, so…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
