This year's Academy Awards saw Mikey Madison's work in Anora become the 100th performance to take the Best Actress Oscar. There's much to say about this race, good and bad, and I'm currently preparing some stuff on Demi Moore and Fernanda Torres. But today, I would like to reflect on the category beyond the five women AMPAS chose to recognize. Because, in my opinion, the year's best performance bar none, as well as the film which contains it, was absent from the Oscars altogether. For the season's last Almost There, I invite you to take a trip into Mike Leigh's cinema, a world of deep character work and improvisation, collaborative writing and ensemble dynamics, tonal whiplash and social observation. Let's talk Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths…
To the sound of Gary Yershon's pleasant tunes, Hard Truths starts with a tenor of tentative peace. We observe a father and son go about their business on the outside of their abode, all crisp through Dick Pope's digital photography. But while the actions depicted are perfectly quotidian, there's some tension about them. Especially on re-watch, these men seem to be walking on tenterhooks. Cut to inside the house, where the matriarch, Pansy, is just waking up for the day. Well, she doesn't so much come awake as she sits upright with a startling shout. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays the moment with a degree of vulnerability that will be hard to come by during the next hour of Hard Truths, portraying a woman rattled by the pains of her own mind.
She looks frightened, shaken, but also resigned to a reality that's been her usual for eons. Alone in that spotless abode, somewhat paralyzed by neurosis, these behavioral cues continue, with the birds outside beckoning an inchoate fear that's slowly curdling into a rage. By the time she's seen obsessively cleaning the already clean living room, Pansy's in a fury – her natural state of being. In terms of structure and character, this morning passage is an essential tidbit for it positions the leading lady's aggressive demeanor as something that builds up on some interior unrest, as ineffable as that might seem on a first impression.
Anger is not gratifying for Pansy, no matter how much the audience might be compelled to laugh at her or her victims' stupefied faces. Well, some of the people who suffer her abuse aren't exactly surprised. Her family has grown used to it, as one can attest by her son's reaction. As played by Tuwaine Barrett, Moses is a sad sack of a young man, cowered into self-effacement in regards to a mother who can't seem to express herself through anything less censorious than a good reprimand. Both actors play their scenes insularly, conversations between people who aren't so much communicating as talking in the same space, utterly and paradoxically alone.
And yet, Jean-Baptiste adds layers to her outrage. For every one of her irrational tirades, there's a seed of hurt from which all that fire and brimstone, piss and vinegar, grows. This is especially true in those scenes with Moses and similar moments with her husband, David Webber's Curtley. A lesser actress would surrender to the potential one-dimensionality of Pansy's anger, but not Jean-Baptiste. Another interesting tidbit is how exhausting it all seems, both to the woman's family and herself. You could be forgiven for assuming fury would act as fuel, but not so. Every one of her outbursts seems to deplete Pansy further.
Sure, there's the illusion of a power surge when she's in the middle of a rant, but you can see her come down whenever there's a pause in that vicious speechifying of hers. Pansy's running on fumes and desperate, often looking as if she's trying to reach out and be heard but can't stop herself from sabotaging that attempt with more vituperous bombast. An early dinner scene exemplifies this dynamic to a T while working within the sort of Mike Leigh realist approach that eschews naturalism for something more heightened. Pansy is awfully articulate, her lines spewing out like well-rehearsed monologues, manicured with a writerly touch.
It's the same trick of many of the auteur's most beloved past works, from the working-class soap of Life is Sweet to the driving lesson verbal matches of Happy-Go-Lucky. It's also a tonal twister mechanism that plays into the contrasts and contractions of mood Leigh is exploring with Hard Truths, specifically. For the film's first act, Pansy's rants are hilarious, an insult comic's routine couched within a fine-tuned characterization. Nevertheless, they twist every scene of hers into a state of permanent tension, an uncomfortable status quo in need of release. That needed reprieve comes in the form of Michele Austin's Chantelle, the lead's sister, and her daughters.
Even the way those women negotiate their delivery speaks of a more relaxed realism than the one Jean-Baptiste embodies, closer to the ease of everyday life than Pansy's constant struggle. Living with or as this woman is uncomfortable. Watching her isn't too different, always oscillating between laugh-out-loud cringe and terrified awe at the misery she exudes. When the polar opposites, of tone and acting register, come together in scenes shared between Jean-Baptiste and Austin, you get these glimpses into a past to which we're never given complete access. Hard Truths will make it clearer down the line, but there's a lot of deliberate repetition before we get there.
Not that Jean-Baptiste is one-note or that she handles every scene with the same strategy. A clash with a furniture store's employee sparks a note of insecurity and fear in Pansy, which we only ever see again when she's home alone. The ensuing parking lot argument starts at a place of evident frustration, not at the strangers she berates but at her inability to talk to anyone without starting an argument. As much as Pansy hates everyone else, she appears to have a good share of self-loathing to cope with, too. Perhaps she's angriest at herself. It's a miracle that you can laugh at this, a testament to the tonal prowess of director and star.
"You don't know my suffering. You don't know my pain… I'm a sick woman." So says Pansy, woken from a restless nap after a sleepless night, when her husband asks her to clean the kitchen and cook dinner. It's a first straightforward show of self-awareness that starts to unravel and reveal heaps of resentment toward her dead mother, resentment toward the men in her life that pay no mind to her anxieties. It's easy to see why they'd do so, dismissing her chronic pain because her reactions to it are so outwardly hostile. It's hard to look down on these individuals, and Jean-Baptiste certainly avoids playing the role for pity. She comes close to outright repudiating it, in fact.
Still, the filmmakers are demanding empathy for Pansy. You don't need to like her, but you should try to understand her. This comes to a head 50 minutes into the 97-minute film, when Chantelle cajoles her sister into paying respects to their mother's grave. It's Mother's Day, after all, but Pansy's not about to soften her memory of the dead woman just because it's the right thing to do. However, for the first time, the characters articulate Pansy's pained relationship to her own behavior. She can't enjoy life, and she doesn't know why. She's haunted and sees the unfairness of it, yet can't claw her way out of the madness that consumes her body and soul, from aching jaw to broken heart. She knows she's hated and doesn't believe she's loved.
Hearing Chantelle talking about how their mother died alone, something seems to crack within Pansy and, from then on, Jean-Baptiste's performance stops being about erecting barriers between herself and her scene partners, the camera, the audience. Instead, it's about a crumbling personhood, out of control and atonal to the core. This is best exemplified by the Mother's Day lunch when Pansy breaks down, a compulsive laugh gradually becoming a convulsive cry. All of a sudden, the actress crystalizes the essence of her director's many tragicomedies, bleeding mirth into misery in a way that subverts entertaining melodrama into something raw and altogether uncomfortable.
I'm even more impressed by what Jean-Baptiste accomplishes with her body, seeming to shrink into herself as if eaten up by a black hole trapped in her core. Pansy's tiredness is winning out, and so is her loneliness, a steely quiet that's so forceful because it's preventing us from seeing the woman collapse. She's her own straight-jacket. But, in this case, the confinement isn't just keeping her in. It's also keeping her together. If she stopped containing it all, pressure cooker-like, there'd be no stopping her cracked bits from falling to the ground, dispersing pieces of someone who is no more, someone who's turned into nothing.
The last half hour of Hard Truths is some of the most despondent cinema Mike Leigh ever created, anchored and sustained by Marianne Jean-Baptiste's tour de force every step of the way. Pansy's relationship with a son and husband she doesn't even like – which makes her hate herself even more – takes center stage, and it's impossible to ignore the horrifying reality underpinning all the rancor on display. Scenes like that of Pansy finding herself unable to thank Moses for a Mother’s Day bouquet and her handling of those flowers are heartbreaking. It's not funny anymore. If anything, you start to feel ashamed for having laughed.
Even within the parameters of heightened realism that Leigh workshops with his actors, this is all too real to be tolerable. It hurts, it makes you sick, it makes you want to throw up. At least, that's what I've felt both times I watched Hard Truths. Many have written about the cultural specifies evident in the picture's text and characters, all the ways in which Leigh and his cast have honed on particular aspects of the UK's Caribbean diaspora. I can't speak on that, but I can say that I've known Pansys in my life. Moreover, I've known them in my family. For some, Hard Truths may seem to be a caricature, but I wouldn't classify it as such.
The recognition is intense and lacerating, as is the familiar struggle to see past the abrasive exterior and touch the humanity hiding within. Dramatizations of mental illness often take the easy way out, forging pathways by which the audience may reach a secret interior world without needing to confront their instinctual revulsion, the need to protect oneself from the ire. They soften and they compromise, pulling for a smooth engagement that’s oh-so-different from the lived reality of those in such situations. Hard Truths doesn't do this, and neither does Marianne Jean-Baptiste. For that, they earn my respect, my tears, my admiration.
After being rejected by Cannes, Telluride, and Venice, Hard Truths had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The immediate reactions, including mine, were overwhelmingly positive, even rapturous, especially in regards to the picture's excellent cast. Expectations were high, yet Mike Leigh and company seemed to have met them. Logically, both the director and his leading lady came crashing into the awards conversation. Jean-Baptiste would go on to become a critics darling, earning countless nominations from regional groups and even some victories. On the season's final tally, she was close to the top, alongside eventual Oscar nominees Demi Moore and Mikey Madison.
So much so that she received a rare honor that, to some, might be even more prestigious than the Oscar. Jean-Baptiste won the critics trifecta – NYFCC, LAFCA, NSFC. She's only the tenth person to achieve this, and the first woman of color. Indeed, the Hard Truths star was the first Black actress to take the LAFCA prize. Until this season, only one person had earned the same three prizes without a corresponding Oscar nomination. It was Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh's aforementioned Happy-Go-Lucky. History repeated itself, and another of the director's muses ended the season with an AMPAS snub to call their own. For what it's worth, Jean-Baptiste won the Team Experience Best Actress category.
Instead, the Academy chose Cynthia Erivo in Wicked, Karla Sofia Gascón in Emilia Pérez, Mikey Madison in Anora, Demi Moore in The Substance, and Fernanda Torres in I'm Still Here. In the end, though Demi Moore was the frontrunner after taking the Globe, the Critics Choice award, and the SAG, Mikey Madison, who had only previously won BAFTA, was crowned our newest Best Actress Oscar champion. Had she been nominated, Jean-Baptiste would join Erivo as one of the few Black actresses to receive more than one Oscar nomination throughout their career. Right now, that club only includes the Wicked star, Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, and Octavia Spencer. And, of course, to this day, Halle Berry is the only Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar. It's been 23 years.
You can rent Hard Truths from Amazon Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and Spectrum On Demand. The film might also still be in theaters, depending on your location.