Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths” has a title that screams “take me or leave me.” And it’s truthful to the spirit of the movie that Leigh has made. If you insist that movies sell you feel-good platitudes, banishing disappointments to the outside of the theater or living room, then Leigh’s film may feel like a downer. If you find it bracing when a gifted artist cuts through the noise and the bull and dares to grapple with our private demons, dragging them out into the light of day, then you may be exhilarated.
The idea being resisted here is that of tidy arcs. Films, even those marketed to hipper crowds, generally follow characters who undergo change. Leigh, the legendary British filmmaker, is allergic to such structures. Change can happen in his films, but gradually and at emotional cost, though it isn’t guaranteed. Stasis is of greater interest to him, as in the traps that we set for ourselves when our neuroses wed with our routines.
“Hard Truths” asks us to spend its running time with a relentlessly negative person. It is an inverse of Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” which features someone who scans as a goody-goody. Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a housewife married to a plumber, Curtley (David Webber), and they have an adult son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who lives with them. Their names scan as brutal jokes. Pansy, who spends most of her time in everyone else’s face, is anything but. Curtley barely speaks enough to be curt, and Moses can barely leave his room, let alone lead anyone. This name scheme is an example of the sly and subliminal way in which Leigh builds the emotional infrastructure of his films.
An early image centers on pigeons making their way along Pansy and Curtley’s fenced-off yard. It’s a tranquil pillow shot that’s disrupted by Pansy, who can’t stand the sight of the birds. Pansy keeps their house in a state of relentless sterility—they seem to have lived here for years, and yet visually it looks as if this family hasn’t been here a week. A line of dialogue allows us to parse that the shed out in the yard is Curtley’s sanctuary, one that’s resented by Pansy, who lectures him on the dirt tracked into the house. Family dinners are dominated by the tyranny of her bitterness. The sources of her anger are wide-ranging, from how babies are dressed to the presumptions of people helping animals. Years of this behavior have numbed Curtley and Moses, who occasionally sneak a retort in amongst the jeremiads.
If “Hard Truths” were merely a document of this toxicity, even I would only be able to take so much of it. The wonderful power of Leigh and Jean-Baptiste’s work here partially stems from the fact that Pansy’s outbursts are hilarious. This achievement is unusual: Jean-Baptiste is committed and uncompromising in rendering Pansy’s rage, yet, without distancing herself from her character, she manages to parody this anger. And the parody offers clarity, showing how absurd her anger is, which in turn only intensifies the impression that she is trapped and holding her family hostage with her.
To an extent, Pansy’s explosions of rage strengthen our kinship with her. Her outbursts show her to be profoundly disturbed—she does not allow herself a moment of pleasure throughout this film’s 98 minutes—and also intelligent and restless. But Leigh and Jean-Baptiste don’t want you to get too comfortable. Just when you might be on the verge of finding Pansy charmingly obstinate, they turn up the heat, such as when Pansy lays into a woman working at a furniture store or a cashier at a grocery store. We are seeing in action how “hurt people hurt people.” Filmmakers normally soften the implications of living with hostile curmudgeons. Leigh wants you to come by your empathy honestly.
“Hard Truths” is not a polite art artifact designed only for aging cinephiles. Leigh has never been a maker of those kinds of movies. His films are bracing and messy and alive, vivid with bitterness and disappointment and animal impulses and, yes, eventually with pleasure. There is an astonishing scene where Pansy meets a man (Gary Beadle) perhaps even more enslaved to rage than she, and they get into a profane argument in a parking lot outside of a department store. Before the argument, we see Pansy in her car, drained from her previous explosion, a telling moment that lingers on the rebound. We’re seeing the toll that her tirades take on her, before she hurls into another one with another member of the damned. Jean-Baptiste and Beadle give this scene profound force—the heat of their words is more visceral than the action scenes of most movies.
There isn’t much of a plot to get in our way. We are with Pansy and her situation with her family, learning the lay of the land. Pansy can’t reach out to Moses, who appears to be developmentally challenged. She can’t reach Curtley, a near ghost whose presence leaps forth in those despairing eyes. Moses and Curtley can’t reach Pansy, except for a late moment when son gives his mother flowers, to console her on the anniversary of her mother’s death. Even this gesture is poignantly awkward, stifled: Moses has laid the flowers on the counter, no water in sight. It is another trapped person’s attempt to reach someone from that island of the damned, and Pansy to her credit hears Moses’ cry.
Pansy puts the flowers in water, but then we may remember an earlier scene that establishes that she hates flowers—she’s too much of a control freak to allow herself even this much of the chaos of nature into her life. And so Curtley, in the midst of another of Pansy’s rejections of his social incompetency, throws the flowers back into the yard. This ouroboros of compassion and rejection and perceptiveness between people who love and can barely stand one another is what happens when artists refuse to take shortcuts with characters. It would have been so easy to let those flowers stay in the water in the house, permitting us a bit of hope that Pansy will lighten up. “Hard Truths” would still be a good movie if Leigh had allowed them that grace note. But he refuses. This refusal to make this journey easier for us is not a cynical trick, but a testament to Leigh’s humanism.
Hope springs from the acknowledgement that the flowers were ever bought at all, and from characters that will not succumb to Pansy’s desolation. When we first see Pansy’s sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), at the salon where she styles women’s hair, the sense that we’re given of her openness with her clientele is palpably bracing. Leigh understands that a nihilist pose is easy to affect and never the entire story—even his bleakest films, such as “All or Nothing” or “Another Year”—have moments of human connection that point toward what life can be at its most savory. I could’ve spent an entire movie with Chantelle and the women who come to see her in this salon. The details of their lives and the lived-in wit of their orations would justify the time spent. Chantelle and Pansy are positioned as contrasts in every fashion. Chantelle’s fullness and warmth and kindness are sensual, while Pansy is sharp like a knife.
If you are familiar with Jean-Baptiste’s prior work, most famously her benevolent performance in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies,” her demeanor as Pansy is going to come as an authentic shock. Watch Jean-Baptiste and Leigh together in the short they did for The Criterion Closet after you watch this film and marvel at how thoroughly Jean-Baptiste has effaced herself here. Marvel at the vividness of the demons that Jean-Baptiste has been able to conjure in this extraordinary performance: Her exorcism is our rapture.
Sly and the Family Stone’s music has no shortage of rapture itself, and Questlove’s “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)” is intimately in touch with what makes it move. Questlove is a musician himself, of course, best known for his work with The Roots, and his insider knowledge gives him a considerable advantage with Sly over a regular filmmaker. Speaking with heavy hitters in the music industry, including much of the Family Stone, Questlove communicates on a fine-grained level the process of Sly creating his music. Questlove knows how to talk to us normies who love music but who have no idea how it works, and the value he takes in information lifts “Sly Lives!” far above most rock docs. Questlove doesn’t reinvent the form, but he does turbocharge it.
Talking heads call Sly a visionary, which is true, but that sort of descriptor can get lost in vagueness and hyperbole. Questlove backs it up. There’s an exhilarating montage set to “Dance to the Music” that establishes the formation of Sly’s sound and the band’s rise while offering us a primer on the conventions that Sly was bending. It sounds a little like Motown, but then you got that bass line that gives it the jagged edge of rock. There are suggestions of R&B, but yet the thing moves so fast, with so many simultaneous sensations. Cheeky illustrations show us just where each musical element interacts with the others. This is much more edifying than a typical doc with a boomer waxing on how someone “changed the world” with nothing in the way of specifics to bolster the claim.
A montage, set to “Stand!” establishes the turmoil of the United States in the late 1960s with an elegance and brevity that should be the envy of most documentaries. Questlove celebrates the unity that Sly and the Family Stone represented, with its casual mixture of Black and white and male and female musicians. They weren’t preaching but doing. But Questlove doesn’t stint on the atrocities that drive this story. The lively editing keeps us from getting too complacent even when hearing again about the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War. Questlove keeps history intimate and alive—volcanic—with Sly and the Family Stone’s music serving as an exhilarating through-line. “Sly Lives!” is one of the best films of its kind, capturing the minute process of walking to your own beat. For that, it’s the rare film that’s authentically inspiring.
“Hard Truths” is now available on VOD. “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)” is now streaming on Hulu.
