Hard Truths

 My wife wanted to go and see Hard Truths at the movies yesterday. We'd seen the trailer, and it looked interesting, and it stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste who was the wonderfully serious daughter in Secrets and Lies way back in 1996. Both of us had enjoyed that film all those years ago and it had remained in our minds partly because of Brenda Blethyn’s constant, ‘Sweet-art’ (with a great slide down on the ‘art’ syllable, and because it was an enjoyable movie.

Hard Truths – another Mike Leigh film – is anything but enjoyable. Initially the endless anger that Jean-Baptiste’s character, Pansy, directs at everyone, familiar or stranger, is somewhat amusing and all seems to be leading up to some catharsis. But no, the movie drags on through scene after scene of the miserably-depressed Pansy undermining everything good and finally taking it out completely on her long-suffering husband, who’s long since given up trying to argue with anything Pansy says, as has his 22-year-old son, who retreats from her as soon as he can when he’s at home. The last scene is of Pansy finding out from her husband’s workmate that he’s sitting downstairs barely able to move because he’s put his back out at work. Pansy gets up, but then just sits there, incapable of dredging up even an ounce of sympathy, it appears, for the man. He sits in the kitchen, a tear running down his cheek, knowing that even this crisis won’t change her heart.

You realise about halfway through that Pansy isn’t going to change easily – it’s going take an earthquake to shift her. The earthquake never comes. Three-quarters of the way through she finally consents to go and visit her mother’s grave with her sister, a hairdresser who has her own business, an outlook on life that aims for the positive, and who is successful at what she does. Plus she has two lovely daughters in their early twenties bouncing with life and energy. 

At the graveside, it’s revealed that Pansy had to look after her sister when their mother was forced to go out to work, because her husband had left her. This has somehow contributed to destroying Pansy’s life, and underneath she still hates her mother. In fact she hates all humanity, pretty-much. Her sister, Chantelle, manages finally to get her to come home with her for a dinner with her daughters and Pansy’s husband and son. The son, supposedly never capable of doing anything for himself, has left flowers at home for his mother because it’s Mother’s Day. The dinner party turns to mush because Pansy won’t give an inch. (Did I mention she’s also afraid of insects, the outside world, dirt, other people’s ‘DNA’ on a sofa and so on.) And when she and her family are home again she accuses her husband of not saying anything about his awful mother (which is all we hear about the mother) and then proceeding to throw all his clothes out of their bedroom – surprisingly, they still sleep in the same bed up to that point.

The film has garnered awards from every side. Jean-Baptiste is brilliantly awful – in fact you wonder what it cost her personally to be so awful day after day working on the movie, and, during all the time when the characters were being built up bit by bit in the usual Mike Leigh way. 

And that Mike Leigh way, is I think the problem with this film. It has no real structure. Yes, there are some sequences, as opposed to scenes, but a lot of it consists of Pansy berating someone or other just for being there, basically. The fact that she does could have been told in a few short episodes; instead too many of these scenes just go on and on. They lead us to think that something worthwhile will come out of all this bile, that someone will finally speak the hard truths of the title. But they don’t. In real life that’s probably not unusual. People suffer from someone like this for years because there doesn’t seem any way to convey the truth that they’re unwell mentally and that their sheer aggressiveness to all and sundry is ultimately harming themselves even more than others. 

But this is a film, a story. It isn’t real life and there needs to be some breakthrough, even if, at worst, everybody decides to abandon her to herself.

My wife got completely fed up with it in the end; partly because the last section drags even more than other earlier scenes, partly because there just isn’t any outcome. I’d mostly enjoyed it, though I found the character very frustrating after a while, but even I was gobsmacked when it just ended. As a work of art it was unfinished. In fact it was also unfinished in the sense that it made the audience sit through scene after scene that should have been edited down to the essentials. It’s indulgent on Leigh’s part; he seems to think his audience will just tolerate long scenes of unpleasantness without anyone stepping in and dealing with it – including the main character. You don’t expect a sudden complete turnaround, but a hint of the possibility would have made the rest of the long trip worthwhile.