Hard Truths: Some people are just not worth it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rob Ryan

Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a profoundly troubled and probably unfixable person, she's verbally abusive to her husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Twain Barrett) to the point where they both barley speak to one another as a family, they've probably have had to endure years of argumentation and personal attacks to the point where they've seemingly given up trying. Now the Curtley just spends his days working for his plumbing firm while Moses walks around London probably just to avoid Pansy's toxic energy, at 22 years old, its now the time to think about what he wants to do in life but is too severely depressed in order to do so, Pansy however spends her days indoors sleeping and waking up in horror, almost as if she's annoyed to have been woken up to the world that causes her more and more unwarranted anger, by night Pansy does most, if not all of the talking at the dinner table about all the little things in life she can't stand while the others just sit and eat ever so occasionally interjecting with a correction. The point is clear early on, she makes her family miserable, she makes the public uncomfortable and confrontational and when is all said and done, she makes herself miserable.

On the opposite end of things, we have Pansy's younger sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin) a hairdresser and single mother with two daughters,(Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown) a very cheerful and charismatic family in comparison to Pansy's, not that things are perfect, one of them works for a cosmetics firm and can't get her pitch of the ground and the other is overworked at her computer desk job, but much like Chantelle's customers they still find a way to put a brave face on it all, there is a underlying tension in the air however as Mother's Day is coming up and Chantelle want's to visit their late mother's grave, which Pansy is apprehensive to do so but reluctantly agrees.

This is where the film stops with the sly wit of Pansy's monologues and becomes probably one of writer- director Mike Leigh's most depressing films, Leigh and his cinematographer Dick Pope keep the camera very still and steady and he knows how to utilise every actors screen presence so that silence and pauses overwhelm the soundscape instead of having the entire last act be a shouting match, probably because in the eyes of the characters and the actors possessing them, more and more arguments are simply futile when dealing with someone like Pansy, possibly also because Pansy's anger has always been a tool to conceal her agony that when all of that has been mostly exhausted in the last act, there is no path forward except confronting the hard truths in her life, which the ending vaguely alludes to and gives a sense that maybe Pansy will finally be able to make some important changes in her life that she has been putting off for far too long. We don't ever know though, because that's all we are given, a hint, that maybe something will change but maybe it won't, because all we are given with this person is a small glimpse into her life, a footnote, a depiction of a life so damaged that there's probably no going back.

Leigh is no stranger of depicting characters who are completely incapable of relating to anything and anyone in life, his film Naked (1993) depicted a sad case (David Thewlis) who's abject nihilism and cynicism of the state of the world was basically an excuse to be awful and insufferable to anyone he comes in contact with and to live life on the brink, while a character like that can make you rightfully uncomfortable and repulsed, Leigh shows that in some case, its probably not worth being defensive over a anti social person giving out personal attacks, because all that does is further justify that persons world view and never solves the real issue at hand, which being that persons own personal trauma and internal suffering, Instead we watch in complete numbness as by the end of the film when all of the energy is drained from us and we are almost as empty as Curtley and Moses.

In sharper contrast though, Leigh's 2008 film Happy Go Lucky depicted the happiest woman you have ever seen who makes herself and the people around her happy, that woman was portrayed in a career best by Sally Hawkins and would be a perfect antidote to Hard Truths, though the film is not ignorant to the fact that much like Pansy, there are people who for a variety of different reasons, a completely incapable of feeling any sort of happiness in their lives, sometimes there is nothing that we can do except watch in abject grief.

By the end of the film, I was left stunned because I wasn't sure if I knew what the point was but I guess that's maybe the point, there are people who when its all said and done, are completely incapable of being on the same social wavelength of the rest of us, and that in of itself a tragedy.

I will conclude this by saying that while I don't really put the Academy on a high level anyway, the fact that Marianne Jean-Baptiste wasn't even nominated is shocking considering she delivers possibly the most realistic crying in a motion picture I have ever seen.