Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh Drama

In the pantheon of unpleasant screen heroines, Pansy Deacon more than holds her own. Played by a ferocious Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the perpetually harried and hostile protagonist of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths spews her venom on everyone she encounters — from family members to furniture store employees, and all manner of unlucky folks in between.

Stranding us with such a spectacularly disagreeable person for 97 minutes may seem like a cruel trick, and the movie will test the patience of viewers who prefer their main characters closer to the likable end of the spectrum. But fans of the British auteur will discern, in Leigh’s latest, his trademark generosity, alongside his willingness to show people at their wince-inducing worst. With this prickly, piercing new film, the writer-director presents an intriguing challenge, pushing the bounds of our empathy and asking us to look, really look, at someone from whom we’d surely avert our gaze if we had the misfortune of crossing her path in real life.

Spending time with Pansy as she seethes and suffers, berates and bullies, is by turns exhausting, bitterly funny and, in flickers, illuminating. Whether her bark is worse than her bite is up for debate, but part of the film’s provocative humanistic resonance is its insistence that meanness is spawned from hurt, and, as such, is worthy of compassion.  

Questions of congeniality aside, it’s nice to find the filmmaker back on contemporary ground after Mr. Turner and Peterloo, two consecutive forays into 19th-century English history. Hard Truths isn’t top-tier Mike Leigh — it’s tidier, more schematic, less expansive than his best. But this is nevertheless a vivid, superbly acted and directed portrait of psychic pain and its collateral wreckage, filled out with lashes of humor and tiny brush strokes of tenderness.

The movie is also the latest dispatch from a career-long investigation into the concept of happiness — who accesses it, who doesn’t, how and why, the intersecting roles of structural realities (class and status), personal choices, temperament and plain old luck. Hard Truths indeed feels like it’s in direct, contrapuntal conversation with two Leigh classics: Happy-Go-Lucky, in which Sally Hawkins’ Poppy (like Pansy, a floral name starting with a “P”) dons her blissed-out mood and radical optimism like armor; and Another Year, which observes a contented married couple and the lost souls who orbit them.

Here, race is an additional, largely subtextual element — nodded at, not dwelled on, as a possible factor in Pansy’s anguish. And while some may bristle at a white director delving into the dysfunction of a British Jamaican family, the filmmaker avoids obvious pitfalls by playing it straight; Hard Truths doesn’t have the farcical edge of Leigh’s earlier domestic dramedies like Life Is Sweet, or the pity-the-poor-wretches undercurrent of condescension that nagged at All or Nothing. It’s the work of someone who, at 81, is still seeking out new ways to explore the world and the fascinating, frustrating people who populate it.

Jean-Baptiste’s last Leigh film was Secrets & Lies, in which her Hortense was the poised, patient yin to Brenda Blethyn’s boozy, blubbering yang. Pansy — her mouth set downward in a perma-frown, eyes always darting around in search of a new outrage — is Hortense’s temperamental opposite. Life, for her, is a series of slights and nuisances, the smallest of which triggers her wrath: a banana peel left on the kitchen counter of the row house she shares with beleaguered husband Curtley (David Webber) and their overweight, withdrawn 22-year-old-son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett); pigeons cooing in the yard; and, God forbid, anyone waking her from a nap. For every legitimate grievance — “police harassing Black boys,” for example — there is a litany of pettier ones (charity workers asking for donations, the way a neighbor’s baby is dressed, etc.)

When Pansy ventures outside, she’s at war with the world. As staged by Leigh and played by Jean-Baptiste, run-ins with fellow customers at the supermarket, with a sofa saleswoman, with a doctor and a dentist become mini tour de forces of rage and bad-faith defensiveness. Pansy’s viciousness is comical, her insults possessing a florid, almost literary quality: The aforementioned doctor is “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”; a long-necked woman who dares stand up to Pansy is an “ostrich” and, moments later, “a piece of string.” But her temper is also scary, an explosive manifestation of pathologies both psychological (depression, anxiety, OCD) and physical (migraines, jaw pain, intestinal troubles).

Just when you think you may not be able to take much more of Pansy’s haranguing or Curtis and Moses’ moping — read: 15 minutes into the film — Leigh introduces another key character: Pansy’s younger sister Chantelle (the wonderful Michele Austin), a hairdresser as warm and good-natured as Pansy is scornful and snappish. Scenes of Chantelle doing braids while presiding over gossipy salon chit-chat about dates and diets, dreams and work shifts, are a delicious antidote to Pansy’s tirades, tempering the story’s dourness with much-needed humor and light.

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Whereas Curtley and Moses tiptoe around Pansy’s nastiness, Chantelle engages — shrugging off her most ridiculous riffs, coaxing her out of her angriest moments and gently reminding her that their bond is unconditional. The two women don’t get along, per se, but their fractious interplay has a comfortable, long-rehearsed music of its own. Leigh and his actors bring this relationship — shaped by childhood trauma, simmering grudges and weary devotion — to seamlessly persuasive life.

Leigh also offers glimpses into Chantelle’s day-to-day as a single mom to two bright, vivacious grown daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The tight-knit trio share a small apartment that’s as lived-in as Pansy’s spacious home is sterile. Their teasing joviality and zest make for an even more — perhaps overly — pointed contrast to the moroseness of Pansy’s household.

The thematic framework of Hard Truths is, as in many Leigh films, legible verging on obvious. “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Chantelle asks Pansy at one point. “I don’t know!” the latter thunders back, and though Leigh never purports to have a definitive explanation, a graveside scene in the second half of the film unlocks bits of revealing backstory and insight. Echoing Secrets & Lies, things come to a head at an ostensibly celebratory meal — here, a Mother’s Day lunch at Chantelle’s home, where these characters’ wounds are exposed as well as their touchingly stubborn refusal to give up on one another.

Leigh, whose deep-dive improvisational preparation process with his cast is the stuff of legend (and countless profiles), gets glorious performances from his lead actresses. Jean-Baptiste is in full-on detonation mode for much of the film, and her rants have a bone-rattling power. But through the slightest shifts in expression and tone, barely perceptible instants of softening and slackening, she shows us the frayed humanity behind Pansy’s antagonism — the frailty and fearfulness and festering disappointment. Though Happy-Go-Lucky’s Poppy is naturally ebullient, she also practices happiness as a way of life, an act of joyful rebellion against a harsh world; Pansy, for reasons both explicit and implicit, doesn’t have — and never had — that privilege.

Pansy and Chantal are so clearly where Leigh’s interest lies that the film’s secondary figures can’t help but feel thin by comparison. Curtley, in particular, isn’t fleshed-out convincingly: He’s a victim of Pansy’s ire, but also a cause of it, and that duality comes across less as complex than unclear. Meanwhile, peeks at Aleisha and Kayla’s professional lives — each gets an obligatory workplace scene — are perfunctory at best. Hard Truths sometimes seems uncertain of whether it wants to be a tightly focused character study or display a broader tapestry of lives.

Such shortcomings are hardly dealbreakers in a film that otherwise fits like a small but crucial piece in the greater puzzle of its maker’s career. That sense of belonging is bolstered by fine contributions from regular Leigh collaborators, including DP Dick Pope’s searching facial close-ups and Gary Yershon’s orchestral score, oscillating between mournful strings and bittersweet notes of optimism.

If the matter of why Pansy’s family puts up with her haunts Hard Truths like an unsolved mystery, Leigh allows glimmers of an answer by the time the film draws to a close: Pansy may be a nightmare, but in her howling, despondent way she’s also a life force. And in Jean-Baptiste’s brilliant turn, one detects the possibility — remote, yet distinct — that beneath all this woman’s fierceness and fury is a kind of fierce, furious love.