If one measure of a film’s greatness is the sheer length of time it boils in your memory, then British director Mike Leigh’s 1993 dark comedy Naked truly is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Even three decades later, scarcely a week goes by when I do not have occasion to recall the film’s protagonist, played to bedraggled, nihilistic perfection by David Thewlis, wandering the dark streets of London and unleashing his witheringly cynical worldview to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path.
Naked somehow captured, on film, what Kurt Cobain captured in music — a new species of wounded animal, lashing out in vulnerability and rage at a world gone mad. It was a movie for the zeitgeist, and it resonates now more than ever.
Fast forward more than three decades, and Leigh is offering us yet another singular portrait of despair and rage, this time in the form of a depressed middle-aged woman named Pansy (the excellent Marianne Jean-Baptiste). For the better part of Hard Truths’ relatively short run time (97 minutes), Pansy lumbers around unabashedly lashing out at literally everything and everyone around her: her shiftless son (Tuwaine Barrett), her emotionally vacant husband (David Webber), her long-suffering sister (Michele Austin), a grocery clerk, a dude in the parking lot, a tall white woman she calls an ostrich, it doesn’t matter.
If this sounds like a distinctly unlovely time to spend at the theater, I must confess that Pansy is indeed, at moments, a lot — irritating, cringey, abusive, even going so far as to pick fights with the pigeons in her backyard. The good news is that all of this hurly-burly is in the hands of one of our greatest living writers/directors in Leigh, whose control of his material has never been more masterful, or more sensitive.
What threatens at first to become an unpleasant tour-de-force in pointlessly bad behavior becomes, slowly and intimately, a heartbreakingly human story about grief and loneliness.
Hard Truths, like Naked, is relatively plotless, at least in the traditional Hollywood sense: Pansy sees her beautician, Pansy goes to buy a couch, Pansy and her sister visit their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day. And yet the movie is so exquisitely structured and finely observed in terms of emotional undercurrents that we are carried along on an undeniable arc toward a revelation that is no less devastating for being understated, almost muted.
Leigh has a real genius for gently squeezing the grandest dramas from the quiet stuff of everyday life, and here he burrows down once again into the parochial, working-class reality of anonymous Londoners. Few filmmakers are so wonderfully attuned to the unspoken dynamics of class and social status.
On the surface, his films have an almost documentary feel, plain and neorealist in aspect, but his directorial choices reveal a deep artistry, as well as an implicit trust in the audience’s ability to follow along with the subtle stuff: transitions startle, juxtapositions jar, comedy undercuts tragedy, and vice versa. The editing in Hard Truths, by Tania Reddin, is impeccable; the film flows seamlessly, with an economy and confidence that is lacking in so many movies these days. There is not a moment of waste. Everything fits, everything resonates.
I fear that artful, quiet, downbeat indie films like this — about regular, ordinary people just struggling to get through life — are becoming a rarity unto extinction, and that makes me sad. In its own way, Hard Truths is as explosive and engaging as anything out there — more so, even, because it conveys a sense of grief and trauma that is so specifically human it seems to whisper to the universal in our experience.
I dare say we all have a little bit of Pansy in us.