Within the pantheon of disagreeable display heroines, Pansy Deacon greater than holds her personal. Performed by a ferocious Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the perpetually harried and hostile protagonist of Mike Leigh’s Arduous Truths spews her venom on everybody she encounters — from members of the family to furnishings retailer workers, and all method of unfortunate of us in between.

Stranding us with such a spectacularly unpleasant particular person for 97 minutes might appear to be a merciless trick, and the film will take a look at the endurance of viewers preferring their principal characters nearer to the likable finish of the spectrum. However followers of the British auteur will discern, in Leigh’s newest, his trademark generosity, alongside his willingness to indicate individuals at their wince-inducing worst. With this prickly, piercing new movie, the writer-director presents an intriguing problem, pushing the bounds of our empathy and asking us to look, actually look, at somebody from whom we’d absolutely avert our gaze if we had the misfortune of crossing her path in actual life.

Spending time with Pansy as she seethes and suffers, berates and bullies, is by turns exhausting, bitterly humorous and, in glints, illuminating. Whether or not her bark is worse than her chunk is up for debate, however a part of the movie’s provocative humanistic resonance is its insistence that meanness is spawned from harm, and, as such, is worthy of compassion.  

Questions of congeniality apart, it’s good to seek out the filmmaker again on up to date floor after Mr. Turner and Peterloo, two consecutive forays into Nineteenth-century English historical past. Arduous Truths isn’t top-tier Mike Leigh — it’s tidier, extra schematic, much less expansive than his greatest. However that is nonetheless a vivid, beautifully acted and directed portrait of psychic ache and its collateral wreckage, stuffed out with lashes of humor and tiny brush strokes of tenderness.

The film can be the newest dispatch from a career-long investigation into the idea of happiness — who accesses it, who doesn’t, how and why, the intersecting roles of structural realities (class and standing), private selections, temperament and plain previous luck. Arduous Truths certainly feels prefer it’s in direct, contrapuntal dialog with two Leigh classics: Completely happy-Go-Fortunate, through which Sally Hawkins’ Poppy (like Pansy, a floral identify beginning with a “P”) dons her blissed-out temper and radical optimism like armor; and One other 12 months, which observes a contented married couple and the misplaced souls who orbit them.

Right here, race is a further, largely subtextual ingredient — nodded at, not dwelled on, as a potential think about Pansy’s anguish. And whereas some might bristle at a white director delving into the dysfunction of a British Jamaican household, the filmmaker avoids apparent pitfalls by taking part in it straight; Arduous Truths doesn’t have the farcical fringe of Leigh’s earlier home dramedies like Life Is Candy, or the pity-the-poor-wretches undercurrent of condescension that nagged at All or Nothing. It’s the work of somebody who, at 81, continues to be searching for out new methods to discover the world and the fascinating, irritating individuals who populate it.

Jean-Baptiste’s final Leigh movie was Secrets and techniques & Lies, through which her Hortense was the poised, affected person yin to Brenda Blethyn’s boozy, blubbering yang. Pansy — her mouth set downward in a perma-frown, eyes all the time darting round searching for a brand new outrage — is Hortense’s temperamental reverse. Life, for her, is a collection of slights and nuisances, the smallest of which triggers her wrath: a banana peel left on the kitchen counter of the row home she shares with beleaguered husband Curtley (David Webber) and their chubby, withdrawn 22-year-old-son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett); pigeons cooing within the yard; and, God forbid, anybody waking her from a nap. For each professional grievance — “police harassing Black boys,” for instance — there’s a litany of pettier ones (charity staff asking for donations, the best way a neighbor’s child is dressed, and so forth.)

When Pansy ventures exterior, she’s at battle with the world. As staged by Leigh and performed by Jean-Baptiste, run-ins with fellow clients on the grocery store, with a settee saleswoman, with a physician and a dentist grow to be mini tour de forces of rage and bad-faith defensiveness. Pansy’s viciousness is comical, her insults possessing a florid, nearly literary high quality: The aforementioned physician is “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”; a long-necked girl who dares stand as much as Pansy is an “ostrich” and, moments later, “a bit of string.” However her mood can be scary, an explosive manifestation of pathologies each psychological (despair, nervousness, OCD) and bodily (migraines, jaw ache, intestinal troubles).

Simply while you assume it’s possible you’ll not be capable of take way more of Pansy’s haranguing or Curtis and Moses’ moping — learn: quarter-hour into the movie — Leigh introduces one other key character: Pansy’s youthful sister Chantelle (the fantastic Michele Austin), a hairdresser as heat and good-natured as Pansy is scornful and snappish. Scenes of Chantelle doing braids whereas presiding over gossipy salon chit-chat about dates and diets, desires and work shifts, are a scrumptious antidote to Pansy’s tirades, tempering the story’s dourness with much-needed humor and lightweight.

Whereas Curtley and Moses tiptoe round 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 2 girls don’t get alongside, per se, however their fractious interaction has a snug, long-rehearsed music of its personal. Leigh and his actors carry this relationship — formed by childhood trauma, simmering grudges and weary devotion — to seamlessly persuasive life.

Leigh additionally gives glimpses into Chantelle’s day-to-day as a single mother to 2 vivid, vivacious grown daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The tight-knit trio share a small house that’s as lived-in as Pansy’s spacious house is sterile. Their teasing joviality and zest make for an much more — maybe overly — pointed distinction to the moroseness of Pansy’s family.

The thematic framework of Arduous Truths is, as in lots of Leigh movies, legible verging on apparent. “Why can’t you take pleasure in life?” Chantelle asks Pansy at one level. “I don’t know!” the latter thunders again, and although Leigh by no means purports to have a definitive clarification, a graveside scene within the second half of the movie unlocks bits of unveiling backstory and perception. Echoing Secrets and techniques & Lies, issues come to a head at an ostensibly celebratory meal — right here, a Mom’s Day lunch at Chantelle’s dwelling, the place these characters’ wounds are uncovered in addition to their touchingly cussed refusal to surrender on each other.

Leigh, whose deep-dive improvisational preparation course of along with his solid is the stuff of legend (and numerous profiles), will get wonderful performances from his lead actresses. Jean-Baptiste is in full-on detonation mode for a lot of the movie, and her rants have a bone-rattling energy. However by way of the slightest shifts in expression and tone, barely perceptible instants of softening and slackening, she exhibits us the frayed humanity behind Pansy’s antagonism — the frailty and fearfulness and festering disappointment. Although Completely happy-Go-Fortunate’s Poppy is of course ebullient, she additionally practices happiness as a lifestyle, an act of joyful revolt in opposition to a harsh world; Pansy, for causes each specific and implicit, doesn’t have — and by no means had — that privilege.

Pansy and Chantal are so clearly the place Leigh’s curiosity lies that the movie’s secondary figures can’t assist however really feel skinny by comparability. Curtley, specifically, isn’t fleshed-out convincingly: He’s a sufferer of Pansy’s ire, but additionally a explanation for it, and that duality comes throughout much less as complicated than unclear. In the meantime, peeks at Aleisha and Kayla’s skilled lives — every will get an compulsory office scene — are perfunctory at greatest. Arduous Truths typically appears unsure of whether or not it needs to be a tightly centered character examine or show a broader tapestry of lives.

Such shortcomings are hardly dealbreakers in a movie that in any other case matches like a small however essential piece within the larger puzzle of its maker’s profession. That sense of belonging is bolstered by positive contributions from common Leigh collaborators, together with DP Dick Pope’s looking facial close-ups and Gary Yershon’s orchestral rating, oscillating between mournful strings and bittersweet notes of optimism.

If the matter of why Pansy’s household places up along with her haunts Arduous Truths like an unsolved thriller, Leigh permits glimmers of a solution by the point the movie attracts to a detailed: Pansy could also be a nightmare, however in her howling, despondent approach she’s additionally a life pressure. And in Jean-Baptiste’s good flip, one detects the chance — distant, but distinct — that beneath all this girl’s fierceness and fury is a form of fierce, livid love.