In British filmmaker Mike Leigh’s 1996 domestic drama Secrets & Lies, Timothy Spall delivered a memorable third-act monologue to his family, including the newly resurfaced half-Black daughter (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) that his working-class sister gave up for adoption. The family is at each other’s throat, and Spall is in agony: “We’re all in pain,” he wails. “Why can’t we share our pain?”
In Mike Leigh’s world, family is pain. (Also: joy, jailer, salve.) In the back half of his five decades in filmmaking, Leigh has mounted ambitious historical pieces –1999’s Gilbert & Sullivan romp Topsy-Turvy, 2004’s abortionist drama Vera Drake, 2014’s magisterial J. M. W. Turner biopic Mr. Turner (also starring Spall), and his most recent film, 2018’s limply received Peterloo Massacre re-creation, Peterloo. But Leigh’s most consistent canvas is the contemporary family unit. Crafting characters with his actors in a weeks-long process, like building layers with paint, the result is family units that feel remarkably lived-in; their pain, their resistance to being vulnerable, their blocked pathways to loving, all minutely observed.
As Secrets & Lies’ most abused character, the ignored adopted daughter with the patience of a saint, Jean-Baptiste was all gentleness. She brings the opposite energy to Hard Truths, her first reunion with Leigh since that Oscar-nominated turn and a towering performance in itself. (American audiences may recognize her from network television roles on Without a Trace and Blindspot.) Playing the matriarch of a British Jamaican family, her Pansy doesn’t so much speak as screech. She radiates toxic energy, but her emissions are so breathtaking – in their vitriol, their dizzying logorrhea – she draws you in like a tractor beam. No one is immune from Pansy’s cutdowns – not her contractor husband Curtley (Webber) nor her emotionally withdrawn son Moses (Barrett), who still lives at home, not the guy who wants her parking space, the woman who wants to sell her a sofa, or the doctor who wants to figure out what ails her. (It’s never specified, but Pansy’s chronic exhaustion and lack of helpful diagnosis made me wonder long COVID.)
In marked contrast, Pansy has a sister named Chantelle (poignantly played by Michele Austin, another Secrets & Lies alum). Chantelle is Pansy’s opposite: less well-to-do, a single parent, easy and affectionate with her two adult daughters, and emphatically glass-half-full. The script does not overexplain how these two women arrived at such starkly different outlooks on life, which is a relief; it’s so much more rewarding to do the work yourself, working out how grief and middle-age disappointments have been the making or breaking of them.
There’s humor here – Mike Leigh has always found something darkly funny in our shambling human condition – but Hard Truths is not an easy watch. To get personal: I recall shuddering with familiarity at his portrait of a woman who really needed to quit drinking in 2011’s exquisite Another Year (shudders aside, it still took me another eight years to pull the plug). Now trudging through my late 40s – the usual bodily breakdowns, all the ways my worst tendencies have calcified – my god, to behold Pansy is to stare into the abyss, into a very plausible future where a person could curdle into their worst version. I don’t mean that to sound unkind; Hard Truths is in fact quite generous in its exploration of a woman in profound pain, and you want to meet it with the same compassion. If Poppy can’t share that pain with her family, then at least she can share it with us.
This article appears in January 24 • 2025.