Hard Truths.

Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets & Lies was a breakthrough for the British writer-director, earning him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay along with nods for both of its leads, including a then relatively unknown actress named Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The two reunited last year for Hard Truths, a film delayed several years by the pandemic, this time putting Jean-Baptiste in the lead role as quite possibly the literal Worst Person in the World in a story that just barely scratches the surface of why she is who she is. (You can rent Hard Truths now on Apple and Amazon.)

Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy Deacon, who we first see as she is obsessively cleaning her house, taking time out to scold and denigrate both her 22-year-old son Moses and her husband Curtley, both of whom seem unable or unwilling to defend themselves against her verbal onslaughts. She takes the same misanthropic attitude into the world, starting fights with a furniture store employee, other patrons in a grocery store, and, eventually, her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin). Chantelle first appears to be the opposite of Pansy, as she’s bubbly, outgoing, and trying to move forward where Pansy complains about likely imagined health ailments and uses them as excuses not to leave the house. Even Chantelle’s household is livelier; her two adult daughters live with her, and we see them acting silly and loving, where Pansy’s house is sterile and ruled by fear.

Most descriptions of Hard Truths describe Pansy as ‘depressed,’ but that’s not how the film depicts her; there is, at least, a hell of a lot more going on here. The script gives all sorts of little clues that maybe she’s anxious, or has a phobia of germs or dirt, or has OCD, or something else, but avoids any sort of diagnosis or other facile explanations for how she acts: The point is that this is who she is, not what a piece of paper might say. The only tangible cause we learn that might explain some of Pansy’s behavior is that her mother, Pearl, died five years earlier, and Pansy has still not processed or faced this. She has unresolved feelings about how her mother treated Chantelle differently, and the role Pansy was forced to play in the family once their father died. She fights Chantelle over the latter’s annual visit to their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, using it as an excuse to belittle her son and husband for failing to acknowledge her on the holiday (which may not even be true, as it’s clear she’s not a reliable narrator). She’s also beset by nightmares that are never explained, another subtle hint that there is much going on below the surface that we can’t see – as the bromide goes, you never know what someone else is going through. It doesn’t excuse the vicious things she says to strangers or family members, or the way she responds to innocuous comments as if they are hidden insults or provocations for fights, but it underscores that even a seemingly irredeemable, one-note character may be more complex than they first appear to be.

Hard Truths is more a character study than a traditional film, as the narrative is slight and there is very little resolution for anyone, certainly not for Pansy. Chantelle and her daughters have their own struggles and obstacles – we see slivers of everyone’s lives even though Pansy’s life is the dominant plot strand – but they muddle through, and they’ll likely continue to do so. Both of her daughters have pretty lousy days at work when we first see them, yet when they meet for drinks afterwards, neither lets the setbacks affect them – perhaps confiding too little in a sibling, a person who is likely to accept you for who you are and will probably take your side in any conflict, but better than taking their anger over injustice in one area and lashing out at someone else as a result. The result of the focus on character is that this is a movie where very little happens, so the main cathartic moment is expository rather than explanatory. That won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, whether you want Pansy to get her comeuppance (she doesn’t) or turn around and apologize to everyone (also, she doesn’t) or realize that the real treasure was the friends she made along the way (I’ll let you figure that one out). It’s such a well-written story of unpleasantness, with Jean-Baptiste – who really should have earned a Best Actress nod over Karla Sofía Gascón – giving such an intense portrayal of a woman whose inner spring is so tightly wound inside that the slightest touch makes her explode, that the meager plot didn’t matter much to me in the end, even if I perhaps wanted a little more in the resolution.