Director: Mike Leigh Screenwriter: Mike Leigh Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone Distributor: StudioCanal Running Time: 97 min. MPAA: R

Mike Leigh has a certain wizardry with how he crafts characters that are so real it hurts. Hard Truths is a return to form for the director/screenwriter, returning to melodrama most effective rather than his recent historical epics. He stages a film so eerily accurate in portraying troubled people that it’s spellbinding enough to be a stage play, performed with the same amount of eye-locking vigor.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste is at her best for playing the anxious mess, Pansy Deacon. She’s a wife and mother who seems to bicker over every qualm that crosses her path. It’s enough to make her plumber husband Curtley (David Webber) avoid any confrontation. That goes double for her silent son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), placing a tight lid on the anger he has for his feuding mother degrading him for his laziness. They don’t want to stir up anymore fury in a house where Pansy is constantly complaining about everything from animals in the yard to the choice in dinner. She’s annoying, yes, but also clearly someone who has been hurt.

Leigh never makes Pansy such an easy target for sympathy, testing the audience as much as her outrage tests her family. Her fights go all around, spitting complaints at everybody from the dentist to a furniture salesperson. She can’t get along with anyone and every conversation seems to be a battle, burning her out to the point of curling up in bed to escape from the world. She’s insufferable to be around and part of her knows that, letting the fear and depression swirl into a bile mix of self-hatred so boiling that it spills over everything like a volcano.

The only person who might be able to reach her is Pansy’s sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser with two grown-up girls. Despite Pansy’s teeth, the sister manages to connect over their mother’s death anniversary. A troubled past makes Pansy fearful of ending up as terrible and alone as her matriarch. The good news is that Chantelle will stick by her side, loving her sister no matter how many managers she may ask to see in her trips to the store. The same goes for her family, proving Pansy wrong in her anxious fears of never being loved by her family and regretting the life she has lived, only to be surprised by her son’s effort at a gift.

It’d be so easy to declare Pansy an uppity bitch and call it a day, but that’d be too simple. From the perspective of a customer or employee only meeting her once, that hatred is present. But it’s the lives of her family that become most compelling in how they realize they’re stuck with her. They’re frustrated by Pansy’s picking of every minor inconvenience and even find small ways to bite back, but they ultimately realize they’re stuck with her. She might get better, but it won’t happen overnight or with a tearful evening of airing grievences. It could take years for her to change her attitude. Maybe she’ll never get better. There’s something so deeply sad about this character and those who struggle to love her trying to find more of the heart beyond the hurt.

Hard Truths is a magnificent drama that makes the most of its small world built from anxiety, depression, sadness, and love. It’s a move that is unpredictable in where it will go, but so grounded in its appearances that you’ve likely met someone like Pansy, riddled with so much baggage they can barely function. This film does not present that type of person as a characicature, villain, or pitiful figure. She’s a complicated mess where the struggle is all over, from the internal paranoia of being seen as terrible to the external interactions of those patient for her tirades. She’s made human in such a film, finding a deeper connection with those who can’t even make it to the on-ramp of positive social interation.

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