"Hard Truths" is the kind of movie I think is extremely good, almost great, but that I could hardly "recommend" to anyone. It's extremely unpleasant to watch and most movie-goers will just think, "why am I inflicting this on myself"? I admit, as much as I admire the film, I understand where said movie-goer would be coming from.
Part of what makes watching "Hard Truths" so difficult is that by the standards of conventional narrative nothing "melodramatically sad" takes place. This is simply a slice of life of an exceptionally unhappy, though in no way conventionally "struggling", family. The pain the film depicts isn't brought about by an incident. It's a general reaction to the experience of life in the world. Most of us have felt this negative response to life at some point or another, and many of us have known people, like the main characters in this film, who have made choices they are scared to change that have kept them in a permanent state of misery. That is why the film feels so, well, true, but also unpalatable.
If I was trying to convince someone to watch "Hard Truths" I would compare it to a painting. The greatest portraitists create works expressing a full range of emotions in their sitters, sometimes the experience of an unexplained sadness or suffering. Yet such works are still considered beautiful and, in some sense, pleasurable to look at. Mike Leigh is a well-established dramatic master. Rarely in his career though have I sensed such an exceptional eye for detail on the director's part as in this work. Every aspect of the characters' world beautifully reflects the dreadfulness of their inner state. Their home, for instance, is, at first glance, generally pleasant but one comes to sense a fully artificial, unlived in aspect to it. It's not a home as much as a tomb for the living.
As is true with any film, this "portrait" is not the work of its director alone. In this case, the cast has an especially important part to play in accomplishing the work. Much has been written about Marianne Jean-Baptiste's lead performance as Pansy and she fully earns the encomium. David Weber and Tuwaine Barrett, as Pansy's husband and son Curtley and Moses, live up to Jean-Baptiste's firepower. This is less true of Michele Austin as Chantelle, Pansy's long-suffering sister, although I blame this less on the actress than on Leigh's only false note in the direction. The lively and boisterous home Chantelle shares with her daughters is a bit too brazenly contrasted with that of Pansy and company.
The quality of the performances both helps make the comparison to a painted portrait possible but also what ultimately makes it inadequate. The early film theorist Bela Belazs proclaimed that the most unique aspect of the cinematic frame was the way it made humanity visible as never before, especially in the form of the close-up. The film "Hard Truths" most reminded me of was Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc". It's close-ups of the weeping actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti transcend the Joan narrative and impels the viewer to wonder from what source Falconetti expresses, manifests, this angst. Viewers of "Hard Truths" enter into a similarly conjectural/ empathic relation to Jean-Baptiste. It is only this affect of the performative aspect of cinema that invites the viewer to ponder the film's central question: what is the source of Pansy's suffering, what makes people unhappy and in extension, what makes happiness possible? It is a question that the film wisely leaves unanswered, at least in any verbally expressible way.
Belazs's theory of film would seem as pure a proclamation of the metaphysics of presence as one might hope to find in the twentieth century. I am no champion of this metaphysics and would often lean on the side of its prominent critics- Derrida and company who would tend to say that reality can only be referred to through the displacement of language. I must say, however, that the ending of "Hard Truths" is a compelling argument that the most difficult truths can, and perhaps can only, be acknowledged wordlessly.
