Review: 'Hard Truths' is a like an emotional powderkeg ready to blow

Just this week the great Marianne Jean-Baptiste won the best actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle (I'm a member) for the blazing brilliance of her take-no-prisoners performance in "Hard Truths," the new Mike Leigh film that means to shake you and does.

That award should be the first of many, such is the hurricane intensity of Jean-Baptiste as Pansy. The thing is, Pansy isn't just mad at her husband Curtley (a stoic David Webber) and her 22-year-old, unemployed son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), she's mad at the world.

In her first scene in the film, Pansy wakes up screaming. But Leigh is quick to show us that Pansy is afraid, trembling at the idea of living in a world that she only thinks she can shout down.

When her son goes for a simple walk, she warns him the police will accuse him of "loitering with intent." Her husband, who raises pigeons in their backyard, nearly ducks when Pansy screams, "don't drag them rancid bird droppings into my house." And pity the chirpy saleswoman at a furniture store, who dares to ask Pansy, "Can I help you?"

It's not that Pansy is hard to like, she's impossible to like. She is also ferociously funny, but you can't laugh off the pain festering inside her like a wounded animal.

What Leigh offers audiences is a chance to understand her. And what, you may ask, does this white British filmmaker, 81, know about Pansy and her life in a working-class sector of London's Afro-Caribbean community?"

Plenty as it turns out once you comprehend Leigh's methods as a filmmaker who writes the basic plot and some dialogue for his movies and then rebuilds his scripts after months of private improvisation with his actors. The result is a string of masterworks ("Naked," "Life is Sweet," "Topsy-Turvy"), which include 1996's "Secrets & Lies," his first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste, who won an Oscar nomination for her efforts. She may go all the way with "Hard Truths."

The plot, such as it is, pivots around a Mother's Day invitation Pansy and her family receive from her sister Chantelle (a superb Michele Austin), a local beautician who lives close by in an apartment as warm and boisterous as Pansy's is sterile and lifeless.

As the elder sister, Pansy was forced to shoulder responsibilities that Chantelle was spared. Pansy is clearly envious of the rapport Chantelle shares with her two daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who work at making Pansy, Curtley and Moses share in their lives. But any family gathering for Pansy is a landmine.

This Mother's Day also represents the five-year marker of the death of Pansy and Michelle's mother, sparking a visit to the cemetery, which wakes up ghosts long buried about the responsibilities elder sister Pansy was forced to shoulder while Chantelle was spared.

At one point, Pansy rages at her solitary son for not being able to string two sentences together: "Don't you have any hopes and dreams?" She might be asking herself the same question as a woman who's cowed both men in her life into silence with no way out.

Leigh does offer a glint of possibility before ending this charged 97 minutes of cinema. Transcendent and moving, not to mention the laughs that sting, "Hard Truths"—powered by a hall-of-fame acting triumph by Jean-Baptiste—is like an emotional powderkeg ready to blow.