Hard Truths

 

Celebrated British writer / director Mike Leigh's latest film, Hard Truths, is described in some promotional materials as a comedy-drama.

It would more appropriately be described as a harrowing psychological family drama with humorous leavening that lightens, somewhat, the enormous weight of the movie's distressing story of the toll mental illness can take on a family.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who appeared in Leigh's wonderful 1996 film Secrets and Lies, carries this heavy picture on her back as Pansy, a wife and mother in London who appears to be suffering from at least a half-dozen mental and emotional problems ~ paranoia, agoraphobia, social anxiety, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic disorders and hypochondria. She's an unholy mess, a terror to her emotionally trampled plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber), and her diffident and depressive son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who receives the bulk of Pansy's verbal abuse because he's 22, unemployed and living at home, arrested in his development to adulthood.

Pansy's beautician sister, Chantelle (played with wonderful bonhomie by Michele Austin) is at a loss for how to help her older sister, whose anger and resentment seem to grow worse by the day, if not by the hour.

A visit to their mother's grave followed by a Mother's Day gathering at Chantelle's home with her daughters (Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson) turns into a nuclear meltdown that only hints at the extent of the damage has been done to Pansy, herself.

To its great credit, Hard Truths is not delivering easy answers or sunny platitudes. There are no bromides about the healing power of love and devotion because in Pansy's world, even the most innocent gesture is a threat, every extended hand holds a knife, every compliment is condescension and relief only comes in sleep.

Leigh, who wrote the wonderful screenplay, keeps the story free of psychological diagnoses, preferring to "show" rather than "tell" the audience what life is like in Pansy's world, that seems to be shrouded in darkness and misery, and determined to keep the curtains drawn.