RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maybe it’s because this is Black History Month that the complete Oscar lock-out of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths seems so wrong. (It almost hurts more than the dismissal of Better Man.) Hard Truths was also overlooked for the Image Awards given by the NAACP, which is equally troubling. Both omissions reveal the worst about contemporary film culture. This isn’t simply a matter of actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s being ignored (despite already winning most of the season’s critics’ prizes). Fact is: Mainstream opinion has degraded.

It would be an exaggeration to frame the Oscar and NAACP inadequacies as injustice; no contemporary movie has more significance than Hard Truths, for the way it deals with the spiritual trauma of the Covid lockdowns. In addressing this subject, Mike Leigh returns to modern relevance after his two previous films, the period pictures Peterloo, about the 1819 massacre in Manchester, England, and Mr. Turner, a biopic of the painter J. M. W. Turner. In Hard Truths, Leigh comes back to the modern world with tough, piercing frankness.

Leigh doesn’t do trendy social justice movies. Black experience has not been central to his storytelling since Secrets and Lies in 1996. Leigh’s family portraits might be the most searing and loving in movie history — so great that they are sui generis. The middle-class black family at the center of Hard Truths — neurotic housewife Pansy Deacon (Jean-Baptiste); her quiet, self-employed plumber husband Curtley (David Webber); her withdrawn, overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) — contradicts Hollywood black characters who are usually most-needy cases. Pansy’s beautician sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), another black small-business owner, and her two single, careerist daughters, Kayla and Aleisha (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown), make their way in the world without the blame-whitey cliché predominant in the mainstream media’s presentation of blacks.

Leigh avoids the victimization angle, despite how easy it would be to do a Marxist exposé of “systemic racism.” Instead, he prefers a time-honored folk inquiry, viewing the Deacons as part of a larger social experience. Focusing on Pansy’s inability to reconnect with the outside world, her demoralization by an incessant sense of doom, makes this a post-Covid film. The lockdowns have bewildered leftists most of all, given their eagerness for “change” and social control that levels the playing field through government authority and community conformity. (The Covid mantra “We’re in

After the lockdowns gave the Left absolute, tyrannical dominance, it’s no wonder that the Oscars and NAACP ignore Pansy’s individuality, along with the distress of lockdown sufferers; it exposes their own willing conformity. Pansy goes against Hollywood’s hallowed black stereotypes: Halle Berry’s slatternly mother in Monster’s Ball, Octavia Spencer’s psychotic baker in The Help, Monique’s monstrous welfare mom in Precious, Viola Davis’s repressed mother in Fences, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s obese, alcoholic mother in The Holdovers.

Those award-winning victimhood stereotypes equate social grievances with mundane heroism while Leigh’s close-up view of individual psychological stress seems designed to overpower banal politicization.

On a C-Span Black History Month broadcast, a black female academic noted “the black struggle for freedom that never ends,” which merely satisfies the narcissism of activists and their allies. But Pansy and her people are too emotionally large for that. The power of Hard Truths lies in the recognizable difficulty of contending with family turmoil without using social history as a convenient excuse.

Among Jean-Baptiste’s most extraordinary moments is the intimate Mother’s Day gathering that takes place without melodramatic fireworks but comes face-to-face with Pansy’s private implosion. She’s like Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Her misery cracks open through an expression of love, when she realizes her own frustrated gratitude. This is the damage that the Covid lockdowns did to us; we suffer not just an extension of Pansy’s neurasthenia or hypochondria, but a fracturing of communication: society overwhelmed by the governmental promulgation of irrational fears. The lies told by the media and politicians surface in the damage that germaphobe Pansy internalizes.

That the NAACP and Oscars neglect to acknowledge Pansy and the Deacons’ shared condition only perpetuates the confusion through which black pathology never ends. It is ironic that leftist Leigh opposes the liberal practice of conveniently using race to frame current perception — even putative cinematic pleasures — as politics. The same liberal self-delusion controls black male stereotypes when Brady Corbet turns European art-movie star Isaach de Bankolé into a drug-addicted, wheelchair-pushing butler in The Brutalist.

It also explains why the NAACP and the Oscars overlooked ex-con-turned-actor Clarence Maclin in Sing Sing; Maclin is so scarily real that, like Pansy, he smashes through the mawkish, pandering truths liberals are loath to confront head-on. He’s too real, Pansy is too reel.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste brings us face-to-face with a woman so much like ourselves — our fear that life is out of our control — that the Academy must disregard that Pansy is a profound artistic creation. Hollywood and the NAACP must pretend that such people and conscientious actors like Jean-Baptiste don’t exist.