HARD TRUTHS. Loath as I am to contribute to the ongoing erosion of the cinematic theatrical experience, and legitimately intriguing as Ash or Locked or Novocaine may seem — genre exercises, all, with promising hints of 21st century cheek and worldliness — circumstances will intrude.
And so, for now, I’ve missed Flying Lotus’ undoubtedly singular (probably prickly) take on a space horror, Bill Skarsgård getting tortured remotely by Anthony Hopkins and Jack Quaid running through boiling oil and broken glass as a nebbish who literally can’t feel pain, in that order. Each boasts an intriguing cast, a novel concept and the promise of a potential good time. But each may, through circumstance, ignorance or disinterest (or the general de-centralization of the movies as cultural touchstones), end up somewhat lost to time. All the better to be rediscovered, maybe; optimism isn’t always my easiest look.
Which may be part of the reason I felt compelled, while unable to get to the theater, to check in with one of last year’s more talked about (among nerds and worldly types) serious pictures, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. Leigh is one of the great stalwarts of modern cinema, a Briton who, like many of his peers, parlayed his theatrical training into a film and television career under the auspices of the BBC.
Since the very early 1970s, Leigh has been writing and directing movies about art, history, the human experience and its various internal and external challenges that, for decades, seemed to me too staid or academic to focus on. This represents a failure of vision on my part, of course, and is based on precious little experience or evidence. Looking back, though, I realize that seeing Naked (1993) when I did, at a time when misanthropy and intentionally distancing monologues could and did satisfy a certain fatalistic impulse in my own psychology, both made me embrace Leigh’s work ideologically and, in times of better mental health, recoil from it. Also, his fascination with period pieces made the whole enterprise feel like homework; shame on me, clearly. Because Leigh, now firmly into his 80s, has doggedly pursued his art and craft for more than half a century, defying financial modelling and cultural trends to build a body of work that, as I can now see, is as much about curiosity and humanism as it is about precise execution.
And one of the more pleasant side effects of the movie industry’s identity crisis (death throes?) is that a movie like Hard Truths, while unlikely to break any box office records in this country, can be made available to those of us without access to an “art house.” (Or, shunted to streaming, if we’re not feeling generous.).
Hard Truths, which bears its title both literally and elliptically, couldn’t be simpler in the summarizing: an extended family finds itself in varying degrees of emotional distress and dissolution, full stop. But, as I’ve come to realize, the great beauty in Leigh’s imaginative work lies in his ability to collaborate with cast and crew to render minor moments in a scale appropriate to their outsize importance in the lives of the people living them, but to do so with a delicacy and lack of artifice that, in its concision and omission, elevates and renders more artful.
That’s a cerebral, possibly “inside baseball” way of examining a thing, but it came as a revelation to me as a person who for so long thought the man’s work was stuffy or conventional or old-fashioned; again, shame on me. Leigh’s work is likely timeless because it seeks to explore the themes and questions upon which art has always been based. Furthermore, he is possessed of a certain ruthlessness of examination and emotional intelligence that enable his actors to perform on the fragile edge of personal well-being, to inhabit spaces of intense unease and suffering in the midst of ostensible normalcy.
In the case at hand, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is at the center of the frame as a wife and mother who, to the casual observer, seems to have it pretty good. Her husband owns a small business, they live in a simple but elegant little two-story house, their adult son is healthy, if unemployed. But Pansy is in a state of abject emotional disarray, both terrified of the world and angry at everyone in it, unable to understand her own inner struggle or the entreaties of anyone around her. She is a woman of a certain age in ongoing crisis and all she wants to do is go to sleep.
By some standards, that’s hardly the basis for a movie but that’s the trick. Because Leigh is both trusting and trustworthy, he helps create a space wherein the breathlessness and terror that everyone will sometimes experience — some of us more than others — can live on screen, contextualized and rendered as art, but without artifice. R. 97M. PRIME.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
THE ALTO KNIGHTS. Robert DeNiro doubles up as rival mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, just like Jean-Claude Van Damme did in 1991’s Double Impact. R. 120M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
BLACK BAG. Steven Soderbergh directs Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in a thriller about married spies with trust issues and work/life balance problems. R. 93M. MILL CREEK, MINOR.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Anthony Mackie wields the shield as the new president (Harrison Ford) hulks out. At least it’s not Nazis! PG13. 118M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
CHOSEN: THE LAST SUPPER PART 1. BYO bread and wine. TVPG. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TOONS MOVIE. It’s Porky and Daffy vs. the aliens and honestly that’s still better than our current leadership. PG. 91M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
DEATH OF A UNICORN. Whoops, a father and daughter (Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega) hit a magical beast with their car and — surprise — a billionaire (Richard Grant) makes it worse. R. 104M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
MICKEY 17. Bong Joon Ho directs a dark comedy about interplanetary colonization. Starring Robert Pattison and Steven Yeun. R. 137M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
NOVOCAINE. Mild-mannered and pain insensible Nate (Jack Quaid) takes a licking going after bank robbers who’ve kidnapped his girl (Amber Midthunder). R. 110M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
SNOW WHITE. Live-action Disney musical. Don’t take any poisoned apples. PG. 109M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
THE WOMAN IN THE YARD. A grieving widow (Danielle Deadwyler) and her family are visited by a menacing figure in black (Okwui Okpokwasili). PG. 188M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
A WORKING MAN. Jason Statham in another side-hustle action movie about a construction worker dad back on his trained killer bullshit. R. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Cal Poly Presents’ Season of Change.