Certainly life isn’t perfect, but Pansy’s rage feels out of proportion with the world’s everyday failures. It takes up space; it makes the people closest to her—namely her overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who’s been bullied into silence; her hardworking but not always sympathetic husband, Curtley (David Webber); and her comparatively saintly sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin)—minimize themselves for Pansy’s sake. And for their own sakes. “A sick woman,” Pansy says, and this inevitably describes her actual health, to some degree—hers is a flavor of spirit-rot familiar to anyone with chronic, debilitating pain, though a medical checkup confirms that this is not Pansy’s issue, exactly. Regardless, the word applies in another sense. She’s sick—of everything.
The premise of Hard Truths is that a short window into the life of this woman is worthy of observation. And so we watch.I’ve heard the complaint that Hard Truths’ plot doesn’t make for much of a movie, but the valuation of Pansy’s inner life, rife with questions about just what is going on with her and whether anyone within the film will come to understand it, is the plot. Leigh’s trademark approaches—the dramatically significant reaction shots, the subtextual selves bubbling up within each conversation—are all on display here and are not original. But the story itself, with its microfocus on impotent rage, feels revelatory.
A moral question throughout Leigh’s work is how to sympathize with such people: and yet we frequently do.
Leigh’s filmmaking method is storied for its intensive rehearsals, in which a skeleton of a plot is fleshed out through improvisation with the actors over several weeks, then firmed up into a standard script, then filmed to the letter. Too much care is taken to grow these people from the ground up, treating them like thoroughly deliberated acts of actorly and writerly imagination, for the question of whether to sympathize to be taken seriously. We sympathize because the actors so clearly do.
Leigh often massages the spines of his dramas through contrasts, foils, and illuminating differences. Hard Truths works much the same. Pansy is nothing like her sister, Chantelle, a hairdresser whose salon is always full, and whose home life, with her lively twentysomething daughters, is abundant. Look at the way Pansy’s family operates in comparison: An early dinner scene gives us Pansy framed on either side by the blank slates of her browbeaten son and husband, who sit silently nibbling away as Pansy expounds on the charity workers who annoy her (“Cheerful, grinning people … can’t stand ’em,”) and the neighbor who offends her (“What’s her baby got pockets for?”). Chantelle and her daughters chat, dance, gossip, and sit together on the couch. Leigh’s methods are simple but sublime: The sun beams into Pansy’s kitchen through her large patio windows, bright rays washing the walls in warm light, and the effect is to notice the emptiness. It’s an emptiness with people in it.
Hard Truths succeeds by being somewhat unpredictable. When Pansy and Chantelle visit their mother’s grave, we predict the scene at the cemetery in which Pansy’s hard wall begins to crack, and she breaks down, finally expressing herself fully to her sister. The less predictable part comes later, back at Chantelle’s home. It’s less of an explosion than the slow release of a pressure valve, well-earned tears that convince us because of how unsettling they are for everyone else to witness. Jean-Baptiste buries Pansy’s discontent in her face, contorted and tense with grief and fury for most of the film, and her body, gnarled with feeling.
A risk Leigh takes in this film—the first of his works to feature an entirely Black cast—is in allowing Pansy to flirt with the trope of the angry Black woman. From the start, Pansy is more than that; she is not merely angry, and her brittleness never feels arbitrary, even as it seems so senseless. A woman who calls her own walled-off, impeccably neat backyard a “godforsaken wilderness”—who’s afraid to even stand on her own back patio—has problems that no one racialized trope can contain. Still, there is the brunt of her; when a stranger calls her a bitch, you wince because the film makes you feel like you know her well enough to know that the term is unfair, but, look, you’ve seen her behavior, you get their point.
In the broad scheme, Hard Truths is not at all new terrain for Leigh, which is to say that curiosity about the future of these characters is natural, because airtight resolutions are not this filmmaker’s bag. Hard Truths benefits from what it doesn’t do, in a sense. It’s too funny, and Pansy is too drastic, to be saddled with the accusations of kitchen-sink dreariness that his earlier work sometimes earned but more frequently had to deflect. You cannot say the film is too neat, because its ending is not neat. The ending unsettles us—not because anything drastic happens, but because life goes on, people’s circumstances change, and what this means for someone so immovable as Pansy is hard to predict, but predictably downbeat.
Often, Leigh will linger in the final stretches of his films. We’ve seen the damage, taken stock of these personalities, drawn our own mental maps of how they might change: Now, let us sit. The film resists the easy pathways to personal growth that we frankly might wish to impose on it. Pansy is who she is. This, on its own terms, is worthy of our grief.
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