With his absorbing film ‘Hard Truths,’ director Mike Leigh sees people in full

Mike Leigh sees people in full. He knows that how we present ourselves to others does not always express who we really are. He literally takes nothing at face value. This gift, this humanism, is particularly pertinent to his fine new film, “Hard Truths,” because its central character is someone who often behaves unconscionably. Leigh is certainly not endorsing such behavior. He is attempting something much more difficult: He wants to understand it.

When we first see Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a London housewife, she wakes up screaming. In the half-darkness, alone in bed, it takes her a moment to register her whereabouts. But no sense of relief comes over her.

Leigh was right to introduce Pansy to us in this way. It sets up her divided soul. Pansy is always on a tear about something. She chastises her woebegone husband, Curtley (David Webber), for not being neater. “I’m not your servant,” she growls. Her 22-year-old son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), mopes in his room playing video games. “What’s your ambition?” she yells at him. Her tone is not that of a concerned mother. It’s a howl of disgust.

It soon becomes clear that Pansy only comes alive when she is at odds with the world. When she shops in a furniture store, she can’t abide seeing customers stretch out on the sofas and gets into a tiff with a saleswoman. At the supermarket, she holds up the checkout line and foments a shouting match. In a parking lot, sitting morosely in her car, she trades insults with a driver looking to take her spot. At the dentist’s office, she refuses hygienic protocols and proclaims, “I am a clean person.”

Pansy’s outbursts come so thick and fast that, for a while, we take an almost morbid pleasure in waiting for the next one. She blows up the aggravations we have all experienced and turns them into cataclysmic events. It would all be grimly funny except that we know, because of how we were introduced to her, that she is in pain. Pansy’s vehement sorrow, and her inability to fathom it, allows us to see her as more than a pathetic exemplar of comic exaggeration.

Despite her protestations, she has a yearning for family. This longing makes her awareness of what she is missing all the more poignant. In the rare moments when she is not on the attack, she shuts down and goes nearly mute. Her husband and son barely speak with her – they are afraid to set her off. But her sister, Chantelle (beautifully played by Michele Austin), who runs a beauty salon, indulges Pansy’s moods because it is clear that, despite everything, they are close. A scene in which the two of them visit their mother’s grave resonates with sisterly regrets. Pansy contradicts Chantelle’s recollections of being close to their mum. “Your memory is not mine,” she says.

Chantelle asks her, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy says she doesn’t know why, and it’s the truest thing she says in the movie. Chantelle’s next words to her are like a consecration: “I love you. I don’t understand you, but I love you.”

After the cemetery excursion, Chantelle brings her reluctant sister, and Curtley and Moses, to a Mother’s Day meal at her flat, where she lives with her two bubbly daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown). Pansy can’t accept their good graces. She thinks everybody hates her, but doesn’t make a scene. Her silence in itself is a cause for concern.

It would be too convenient, I think, to write this movie off as a study of untreated mental illness. The performance of Jean-Baptiste (who was so memorable in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies”) transcends the clinical. She shows us what lies beneath Pansy’s suffering. This woman who can’t abide other people is terrified of being alone. Jean-Baptiste and Leigh have the utmost compassion for what Pansy is going through. Extreme as she is, we can see ourselves in her. A lesser movie would have tidied things up at the end, but Leigh is too much of an artist for that. He recognizes that in matters of the heart, and of the mind, easy resolutions are few.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Hard Truths” opens in limited release Dec. 20, and goes wide Jan. 10, 2025. It is rated R for language.

Editor’s note: This review, originally published Dec. 18, 2024, has been updated to correct the setting of the conversation where Chantelle tells her sister she loves her.