Pansy Deacon, the London woman played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths, is a talker. But she doesn’t speak to people so much as she erupts at them. Anyone who crosses her path gets subjected to semi-legible selections from what is clearly a relentless inner monologue of grievances. To her husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), Pansy’s akin to a monster in the house, an oppressive force to be avoided in the day or endured during dinner as she delivers rants toward their downturned heads. To any strangers unlucky enough to cross Pansy’s path, she’s a day-wrecker capable of escalating any passing encounter into a verbal conflagration. Either way, Pansy is a deeply unpleasant person to be around. Viewers, who can watch her without the danger of ever encountering her in real life, have the luxury of conceding she’s also very funny, but she is devoid of any sense of humor herself.
There’s a poetry to Pansy’s free-associative griping, which in the space of a few sentences can swing from concerns about racist police harassment to speculation as to whether pet clothes constitute animal cruelty: “Why’s the dog got on a coat? It’s got fur, ain’t it?” She has a particular facility for insults — when she informs a woman on line behind her at the grocery store that she’s “standing there like an ostrich,” our eyes drift to the generous length of neck on the lanky actor cast in the part. But the line that keeps rattling around in my head isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. While visiting the grave of her mother, Pearl, whom she still mourns and bears a grudge against, Pansy mutters to her cheerier sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) that she’s “haunted … haunted.” What she’s haunted by is unclear and, by that point, incidental — that Pansy can’t make any pleasure in life matter more than what landed her at this point. Jean-Baptiste delivers this utterance with the hollowness of someone who’s just come back from a war instead of a housewife and mother who picks fights with employees at a furniture store. Pansy may not be able to explain the existential threat she feels like she’s living under, but Jean-Baptiste makes us believe the depths of her devastation.
There were plenty of terrific performances last year, and none of them hold a candle to what Jean-Baptiste does in Hard Truths, though the comparison feels unfair. Pansy isn’t just a feat of acting, but one of creation, constructed by Jean-Baptiste and writer-director Mike Leigh over weeks, given a history and interior landscape that a movie could then be built around. Leigh’s films aren’t just improvised; he works with his actors to build their characters, beginning from fragments of people they know and ending with something that feels more whole and tangible for having come first instead of being conceived of in relation to the plot. Jean-Baptiste knows this process well — her first film with Leigh, 1996’s adoption drama Secrets & Lies, won her an Oscar nomination; then she appeared in one of his stage productions, and, with Tony Remy, she composed the score of his 1997 film Career Girls. (At the New York Film Critics Circle awards earlier this week, Leigh saluted his leading lady’s polymath gifts by noting that she also paints and that he keeps a portrait she’s made of him in his bathroom.) For seven years in the wake of Secrets & Lies, she worked in the U.S. on more than 150 episodes of the procedural Without a Trace. In contrast, her turn in Hard Truths has the revelatory feel of Clark Kent taking off his glasses and reminding us of the superhuman feats he’s been capable of the whole time.
As creatively decadent as these process details are, dwelling on them too much risks rendering abstract a performance that’s as vital as it is challenging, filled with contradictions that make it feel all the more organic. We hang a lot on the concept of likability as something that’s either unfairly demanded, especially of female characters, or that has to be thrown out like a provocation. And yet, the idea of even considering Pansy in that matrix is laughable. Pansy is confounding, rancorous, and utterly lost — while playing her, Jean-Baptiste’s mouth keeps retracting into a sneer that seems involuntary, like a trapped animal trying to appear threatening when it’s really scared. But Pansy can’t simply be dismissed as an embittered nightmare, even as she goes about her day spreading petty terror (“a mouse with glasses squeaking at me” is how she refers to a doctor she stalks out on). This is because of Jean-Baptiste, who never allows us to lose sight of the fact that Pansy’s behavior is born out of an inchoate pain whose roots could lie with so many things — her undiagnosed mental illness, her unhappy marriage, or her resentment of the mother who she believes favored her younger sister, whom Pansy had to help raise after their father left. At the heart of Hard Truths, and of Jean-Baptiste’s inimitable performance, is an appreciation that it doesn’t ultimately matter why Pansy ended up the way she is — that what matters at this point is how she lives with it.
The film with which Hard Truths is most in conversation isn’t Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste’s last onscreen collaboration with Leigh, but Happy-Go-Lucky, the filmmaker’s 2008 comedy starring Sally Hawkins as Poppy Cross, a schoolteacher with an irrepressibly chipper personality. In the same way that Poppy’s unfaltering cheerfulness in the face of animosity and loss verges on the pathological, Pansy’s capacity to react to any scenario with rage or disgust makes her a sort of negative counterpart, a spiritual sibling in reverse. The world is a bewilderingly hostile place to Pansy, one she wakes up to with a shriek of panic, as if under attack. Sometimes the fact that she’s responsible for so much of the turmoil around her almost registers. After a confrontation with a salesperson at a furniture store, whom she accuses of harassment and intimidation for having the temerity to ask if she needed help, Pansy quietly scurries out the door and sits in her car. Jean-Baptiste’s face in that moment is that of someone right on the threshold of a revelation. Pansy, near tears, appears to be aware that something is very wrong, though after existing in a reactive state for so long, she is terrified of addressing it. Then a man in search of a parking spot pulls up and asks if she’s leaving. The ensuing exchange of insults relieves our heroine of the perils of self-examination, and Pansy looks closer to happiness than she does anywhere else in the film.
In interviews, Jean-Baptiste has said that watching Hard Truths for the first time was difficult, because despite knowing that no such scenes were coming, she kept thinking that someone was going to hit Pansy. Watching Hard Truths for the first time, I had a related thought, which is that Pansy sometimes looks like someone anticipating getting hit. When she’s on the cusp of a confrontation, there’s an exhilaration in her eyes that’s both afraid and frightening — the expression of someone who’s about to set something on fire or jump off a cliff into water of unknown depths. She is constantly fucking around in order to find out, though she couldn’t articulate what it is she’s trying to find out. Chantelle is the only person in Pansy’s life who has patience for her, and toward the end of Hard Truths, she tells her sister, “I love you — I don’t understand you, but I love you.” As exhausting as Pansy can be, she’s an embodiment of an impulse everyone has at times. It’s that urge to project the unhappiness we’re feeling outward, and to take it out, however undeserved, on those around us out of a desire to have our pain acknowledged, and to make people join us in it to some small degree. Such is the brilliance of Jean-Baptiste, that we begin Hard Truths trying to figure her flinty, belligerent character out, and end it seeing something of ourselves there — even if we’d prefer not to.