Few movies have ever personified the phrase “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” more vividly than writer/director Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. When philosopher Henry David Thoreau coined that phrase back in 1854 he couldn’t have dreamed of it having so much relevance today. Nor could he have imagined a family quite like the Deacons.
Pansy Deacon is a depressed and anxious woman trapped in a loveless marriage and suffering deep scars from childhood trauma. She is played with absolute conviction by Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Her husband Curtly (David Webber) is emotionally stilted and can barely mumble more than a few words at a time. Her son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) is also scarcely conscious and shuffles through his young life.
Pansy is so relentlessly unpleasant to everyone she meets, if it was any other filmmaker there would have been an early case or uxoricide. But Leigh is a master of telling these kinds of stories and presenting them in a hype-free and believable manner. This forces you to look much deeper into their lives to find some redemptive qualities.
There are just a small number of fleeting moments that hint at a better life for the main protagonists and you have to be sharp to catch them. Those scenes are transformative and reward those with an attention to detail. While Hard Truths is a lifetime away from being a happy experience, it is one that slices through the white noise.
Rob Hudson
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