Marianne Jean-Baptiste Gives the Performance of a Lifetime

Everyone has a Pansy Deacon in their life, or has at least encountered someone a lot like her at their job, a get-together, or simply railing against something or someone in a public place. She's the type of person to find a storm cloud behind every silver lining, to see every glass of water as half full yet also containing an abundance of flesh-eating bacteria. When she unleashes a tsunami of accusations and verbal abuse on whatever her target is — her family, a salesperson, an unlucky someone stuck behind her in line at the shops — the best they can do is avoid being directly within her blast radius. Pansy is the black-hole-sun that every other character orbits around in Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, able to suck every bit of oxygen out of every room she enters. The first time you witness her 120-proof vitriol, your initial instinct is to sprint in the other direction and never look back. By the end of the film, you want to tell her you love her.

Not that Pansy wants any of it — the last thing she's looking for is heartfelt affection, especially from a grubby stranger like you. Misery loves company; a misanthrope, however, does not. But it's to Leigh and his lead actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste's credit that you truly feel for this woman even as she repels you, and that you come so much closer to understanding her even if she remains an unsolvable riddle to herself. The legendary British director is famed for having casts workshop their way through scenarios, essentially finding their characters and the shape of the film through rehearsals before locking everything down into script form. He's worked with Jean-Baptiste before, onstage (1993's It's a Great Big Shame), onscreen (1996's Secrets & Lies, which earned her an Oscar nomination) and below the line (she composed the score for his 1997 movie Career Girls). It's not an exaggeration to say that this latest project marks not just a high point in their collaborations together, but in Leigh's discovery-friendly work with actors and his career-long attempt to capture humanity in all its raw, ragged glory. Both artists are dedicated to giving you a portrait of a broken person. They also demand that you see her as a person, and not an archetype, first and foremost.

“People… cheerful, grinning people. I can't stand them,” Pansy laments to her husband Curtley (David Webber), a man dying a death from a thousand henpecks, and their grown son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). She drops this declaration of her mindset in the middle of a rant about a neighbor putting a coat on their dog and seeing a baby's outfit decked out with multiple pockets. “What's a baby got pockets for?,” she rhetorically asks. “What's it gonna keep in its pockets? A knife?!” Hard Truths is, among its legion of virtues, hilarious whenever it repeatedly gives Pansy a stage on which to eloquently and unabashedly rage, and Jean-Baptiste has a knack for turning these nonstop torrents into comic tornadoes, leaving nothing but wreckage in their wake. Some who wander into her crosshairs give to answer back, which only adds fuel to the fire. The way her loved ones silently cower before her, however, speaks volumes. They have been beaten into submission after years of being on the receiving end. They are the collateral damage in Pansy's one-woman campaign against the world.

If Leigh and Jean-Baptiste were simply interested in giving us someone who answered every encounter with 10ccs of unfiltered aggression, the film would still play beautifully as a cringe-comedy choking on its bitterness. Scenes set in a doctor's examination room, a dentist's office and a corner grocery might have been lifted from a UK edition of Curb Your Enthusiasm. But there's something much deeper, more fulfilling they're digging at here. Pansy is introduced suddenly waking from a dead sleep, screaming out in terror. Once she arises from her bed, she peers out her windows, scanning for threats; a bird's caw in her backyard sends her into a panic. Then she meticulously scrubs down her couch. When others hover into Pansy's perimeter, or she reluctantly ventures out for a trip to a furniture store or a doctor's appointment, she goes into attack mode. But you begin to get a sense that the anger is masking a lot of depression, pain and, anxiety. This is a woman who is consumed by fear. Those tirades are preemptive strikes.

Then Leigh introduces another character. Her name is Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who radiates sunshine, sympathy and all-around good vibrations. She is also Pansy's younger sister, the yang to her kin's yin. The contrast between her and her human doomscroll of a sibling is striking, as is the difference between the bonhomie between Chantelle and her daughters — Aleisha (Sophia Brown), a paralegal, and Kayla (Ani Nelson), who works for a corporate skincare company — and the enter-the-minefield mood in Pansy's house. Yet it's also revelatory. Through Chantelle, we can see a slightly different side of our easily bruised protagonist bubble up to the surface. “Why can't you enjoy life?” her sister asks with genuine concern. “I don't know,” Pansy replies, and the way she herself seems confused by the bottomless reservoir of bile at her fingertips suggests that envies those cheerful, grinning people as much as she loathes them. Chantelle wants to help her sister. Pansy doesn't know how to accept such kindnesses. And therein lies the tragedy.

Hard Truths occasionally unearths nuggets of backstory: their late mother apparently outsourced raising Chantelle to Pansy, and hints of intergenerational trauma are scattered throughout. Yet there are no easy explanations or Freudian shortcuts on display. There's only the aftermath resonating in the present, which is why the movie earns its title with interest. Leigh has given us characters that test your tolerance levels before, notably David Thewlis's motormouthed miscreant in Naked (1993). And after the film's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, more than a few folks noticed how Pansy practically doubles as a negative image to Poppy, the relentlessly, near-annoyingly upbeat hero of Leigh's 2008 character study Happy-Go-Lucky. But this poor woman, stuck in a prison that may or may not be of her own making, is a truly singular creation. It's why, when the two sets of families eventually come together for a Sunday brunch, Pansy doesn't come off like your run-of-the-mill killjoy. By this point, you're able to see the damage in her so clearly, so painfully. It's both inflicted on others and self-inflicted. And still, you want to reach out to her. Rarely has the maxim about movies as empathy machines felt so true, or been lucky enough to have such well-practiced ambassadors.

Leigh and all of his cast are so on-point here, so dedicated to breathing life into these everyday people, that every time he cuts away from Pansy and allows us unfettered glimpses into their lives outside her sphere of influence, you want to follow them into their own two-hour movies. (It's especially true regarding Barrett's take on Moses, a near-silent figure whose sense of self is in constant danger of being snuffed out — yet who still gives you an inner life suggestive of multitudes.) Yet in crafting such a rich and layered character that forces you to work hard in forgiving her trespasses, it's Marianne Jean-Baptiste that ultimately shoulders the film. Numerous actors could have nailed those pages and pages of rage-filled tirades. Only she could have arguably shown you the scared, vulnerable, bewildered person behind the full-front assaults without diluting the hate and still make you sympathize with her. It's such a virtuoso display of heart and spleen in equal measures. And there are moments when, in between laughter and tears, you find yourself wishing you could tell this fictional person who seems all-too-real: It's ok. The actor makes you forget the line between performance and observing someone. It feels so true in the best possible ways.