By M. Faust

“I love you. I don’t understand you, but I love you.”

These words, spoken by one middle-aged sister to another, are the emotional crux of Hard Truths, and arguably of the entire 50-year oeuvre of British filmmaker Mike Leigh, who at the age of 82 remains at the top of his game. 

God knows it’s not easy to understand Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the definition of a shrew. Incessantly bemoaning the sad state of her life, alternately whining in self-pity and belittling anyone unlucky enough to cross her path, she seems to live by the credo, “If you can’t say anything nice, say it loud.” 

For a fair amount of the movie, Pansy’s vitriol is very funny. Unprompted, she lashes out at the outfit of a neighbor’s infant: “What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it going to keep in its pocket? A knife?” When a driver in a parking lot commits the crime of asking if she’s leaving so he can take her space, she spits, “Your balls are so backed up you’ve got sperm in your brain!” Pretty much every random stranger on the street pisses her off: “Cheerful grinning people – can’t stand ‘em!” 

Usually it isn’t what she says as much as the utter inappropriateness that becomes funny—heaven help the doctor and dentist trying to diagnose her imaginary pains, or the clerks when she goes shopping. 

Pansy can’t carry on the simplest conversation with without veering off on some perceived slight that only she knows. We can only imagine what hell life is like for her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumber who seems to provide a good living from the looks of their modern but sterile suburban house, and their 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who hides in his room all daydreaming of being a pilot. 

Pansy is counterpointed with her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a single mother with two grown daughters (Sophia Brown, Ani Nelson), both well-adjusted and charming. Chantelle works at a beauty salon, where her cheerful gossip sessions with her customers tread the same ground as Pansy’s complaints but are relegated to a proper place in life. 

Chantelle’s insistence that Pansy and her family come over for a Mother’s Day celebration sets the scene for the dramatic centerpiece of Hard Truths. Unlike earlier Leigh films, in which simmering tensions usually exploded in a cathartic verbal slugfest, little is settled here. Mostly it solidifies what we have been coming to understand over the course of the movie, that Pansy is to be pitied more than despised, whatever the cause of the psychic pain that disables her. 

Leigh spent the first half of his career making movies for British television rather than feature films because producers always told him that his work was too British for the American market, without which no one would fund him. He first came to international attention in the late 1980s with films like Life is Sweet and Naked. 

From the beginning, critics have been fascinated with his working method. Leigh begins each new project (including plays) with neither script nor story. Instead, he holds workshops with actors in which he and they discuss characters they’d like to develop. This is followed by weeks, maybe months of research and improvisation. The characters come to life, as do the relationships among them; eventually a story emerges. By the time the cameras roll, Leigh has a tight script and a firm knowledge of what the film will be. The results have been movies that offer, as he told writer Ed Grant in a 2014 Artvoice interview, “a highly ambivalent and complicated set of things to think about.”

Along the way, Leigh’s films have also provided exceptional opportunities for actors. It was a shock that Jean-Baptiste, an Oscar nominee for Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), was not recognized by the Academy for this unforgettable performance: she was nominated or awarded by numerous critics’ groups, including the one I belong to. It’s even more surprising that Leigh, a seven-time nominee who has never won, was ignored: he deserves an Oscar simply for consistent excellence over a lengthy career. 

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Nickel Boys is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about young men incarcerated in an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

In adapting it for film, writer-director RaMell Ross decided to shoot everything from the shifting first-person perspectives of its two main characters.

The film has been widely praised, but every review I’ve read compares it to the book, from which we can presumably deduce that the writer has read it. I haven’t read it, and I found the film often impossible to follow; at times, it felt like it was going out of its way to obfuscate story points.

I will not pass judgement on it other than to say that it is primarily recommended to those of you (not few in number, I understand) who read the book. Others, caveat emptor.