Mike Leigh’s Love Affair with Real Life

The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him, it’s a term of great respect, meaning a performer who’s highly skilled, versatile, creative, smart—qualities especially important for Leigh’s actors, who create his films with him, from plot to dialogue. His new film, “Hard Truths,” reunites him with the superlative Leighian character actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who co-starred in his drama “Secrets & Lies,” from 1996, for which they both received Oscar nominations. There, she played Hortense Cumberbatch, a serene young optometrist who seeks, and finds, her lovably chaotic birth mother; in “Hard Truths,” set in a working-class British Caribbean community, she’s Pansy, an anxious, middle-aged wife and mother who keeps a spotless house and rages at everybody she meets. As the movie begins, the camera pans across a series of cheerful row houses with gardens, landing on one that’s identical but for its unadorned severity. Inside, Pansy wakes up screaming; in some ways, she never stops. As the movie progresses, Pansy, constantly at her wits’ end, fights with shop clerks, a dentist, her long-suffering husband and son, her sister. Some fight back; many look baffled, at a loss. Her sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a warm and kindhearted hair stylist, greets life with an easy openness, and keeps trying to connect. “I don’t understand you, but I love you,” she tells Pansy. Audiences might feel the same way. “Hard Truths” is Leigh’s first new film in six years. His most recent before it, “ Peterloo ,” about the Peterloo Massacre, and “ Mr. Turner ,” about the painter J. M. W. Turner, were realism of a different kind: well-funded historical epics about actual people and events, à la his wonderful “Topsy-Turvy” (1999), about Gilbert and Sullivan. “Hard Truths” is a return to Leigh’s classic form: a contemporary, intimate ensemble drama exploring regular people’s lives. His famously rigorous and collaborative writing process, often drawing on a trusted cadre of recurring actor-collaborators, involves conversation, improvisation, and extensive preparation and rehearsal, from which a script of sorts is memorized by the cast but […]

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