Arduous Truths
The Callous Naturalism of Mike Leigh
The working class, in their art and myth, tend to value symbolic ritual, aspirational idealism, and culturally conservative escapism — conventional plots in recognisable genres, magical fairy tales with happy endings and morally unambiguous hero myths. This is why they don’t tend to enjoy naturalistic kitchen-sink dramas by directors like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, films which are ‘about’ ordinary people in much the same way as a zoo is ‘about’ wild animals. Such socially-conscious realism is primarily consumed by the privileged, highly-educated minority that produces it, in order to examine social issues, affirm solidarity with favoured minorities and, most importantly, indulge the need of the professional class to vicariously experience an aesthetically-enhanced universe divested of the ineffable. What remains is a world rendered wholly explicable by material conditions, a reduction that flatters the educated rationalism of the viewer while, like the bars of the cage that the lion is kept in, providing a reassuring distance from the lions of poverty and violence.
Not that realism itself is the problem. The same viewer who turns Kes off in exhausted boredom will swoon at a coldly realistic painting of a dog or Elvis Presley; because she loves the dog, or listens to Elvis, and she admires the skill required to capture them with perfection, however tasteless the final product appears to a connoisseur. A retired cleaner can even enjoy the power and majesty of great realist art, Rembrandt’s portraits, for example, or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, or even the comic genius of Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May. The issue is not the realism itself,1 but the subject it serves. All too often obsessive fidelity to the cold, hard fact of material existence is a cover for intellectual condescension, absence of artistic truth and sterile nihilism.
So it is with Mike Leigh’s most recent film, Hard Truths, by far his worst, although he’s been on the slide since he made us spend two hours in the dentist’s waiting room of Another Year. Each of his conversational pieces says less and less, and so relies more and more on secondary effects to cover the void. Where other, less discerning, directors might use nudity, or CGI, or ten minute shots of melting snow to conceal an inability to tell a meaningful story, Leigh relies on hyper-realistic acting. Once a miracle unto itself (David Thewlis in Naked, for example, or Brenda Blethyn in Grown Ups, or Gary Oldman in Meantime) this phenomenal artistry is now employed as misdirection. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many great actors around these days — which for Leigh is a double blow as his actors, through improvisation, write his stories — so he is now relying on the bitterest cynicism to carry the day, hoping that ninety minutes of watching someone slowly drown will get him into Cannes.
Alas, no. Cannes rejected Hard Truths. The unpredictable taste of the jury probably had a hand in the shocking decision to turn their backs on one of their own, but the main strike against the film is that it is dreadfully bad. There is no real drama; nobody changes; the film looks ugly, like it was made for television; the dialogue is little more than gossip; and the acting conveys a self-conscious sense of ‘I am doing something important here,’ a feeling which always attends the ‘great’ performances of actors with scant experience of life — which is most of them, particularly after they’ve spent a decade in the industry. Hard Truths says nothing, gives nothing and does nothing. It is meaningless, which is why Leigh, betraying both the vapidity of his work and, consequently, his lack of real confidence in it, pushes the responsibility for finding meaning back onto the shoulders of the viewer — ‘Well, you can read whatever the fuck you like into it!’
Is that true? You can get some idea from a summary of the plot, such as it is. A middle-aged black woman called ‘Pansy’ hates everyone — including her husband (whom she married out of fear of loneliness) and her son (who, discarded by his mother, is slowly returning to a lower, vegetative stage of evolution). Everywhere she goes, Pansy antagonises people by bitterly accusing them of the worst possible intentions. We see Pansy’s husband at work, chatting with a friend, we see her sister at work, chatting with a friend, and we see her son, walking around town, but the spine of the film is a series of spiteful arguments which excite the viewer’s exasperated sympathy for the victims of a quite literally hateful woman, who possesses not a single redeeming trait.
Except one. Interestingly, and amazingly, Pansy isn’t racist. She never brings race into her judgements. She feels victimised by everyone on earth, but never by the dreaded white man. Everyone is equally rude to her, equally abusive, equally selfish. The idea that any of the adversaries that this marvellously egalitarian woman encounters might be antagonising her because of the colour of her skin, this doesn’t seem to occur to her. She nobly declines the draught of victimhood, refusing to bring race into her many, many conflicts, seemingly unaware, like Leigh, that such an option is available to her.
Leigh refuses to bring racial grievances into a character who would certainly have them for the same reason he never resolves any of the central conflicts of his plots. He likes to show us couples who hate each other, women who are miserable because they don’t have children, and children with eating disorders, but he resolves their problems not with action, but with words. The antagonists express their discontent, and then either continue just as they were, or they sit in the sun and have a nice cup of tea. This entirely static, and therefore entirely bourgeois, picture of social and interpersonal conflict is one in which, like Pansy’s wondrous racial tolerance, class consciousness — by which I mean middle-class consciousness — is absent. Not just from the minds of the characters — which is to be expected — but from the director, who never shows us anyone suffering from middle-class oppression. His baddies are all working-class (Happy-Go-Lucky, All or Nothing, Vera Drake) or they are aristocrats and yuppies (High Hopes, Naked, Career Girls, Peterloo, Vera Drake ). He pours undiluted spleen upon the upwardly mobile (Meantime, Secrets and Lies and the contemptuously scornful Abigail’s Party2), but the respectable middle-class? Doctors, teachers, architects, managers, specialists and film-directors? Innocent.
The conclusion of Pansy’s story is almost comically bleak. Her husband Curtley, a pathetic coward who spends the film wearing an unintentionally funny look of pained desperation while enduring, without comment or resistance, the phenomenal cruelty of his wife, puts his back out at work and is brought home by a friendly (but, like everyone else, characterless) colleague who, while Curtley waits downstairs, goes up to tell Pansy what has happened. The film ends with Curtley, immobile, in pain, unable to help himself, waiting helplessly, in tears, for his wife… who never comes. She just lies in bed. She has not changed, Curtley has not changed. The viewer realises that nothing that has happened in the last eighty minutes of film has made the slightest difference to what happened in the first ten. A triumph! A classic! Excoriatingly funny!
So that I might better show why Hard Truths is a betrayal of art and life, a few days after watching it fate provided me with an encounter with a real-life Pansy. I had gone into London with my wife, to visit Westminster Abbey, and had surfaced at the St. James’ Park tube station where, because our tickets weren’t working, we approached the woman working at the barriers, to let us through. She, a sharp-faced black lady, appeared to be talking to a colleague: in fact it was to a customer who, by chance, was dressed in dark blue working clothes which looked, to a brief glance, identical to those used by the TFI staff. I was surprised therefore, standing before her at the barrier, that she did not acknowledge our presence. ‘Sorry, excuse me?’ I said, with the tentative ah-er-um tone my people traditionally adopt in such situations, which, again, she ignored, so my wife, a small Japanese woman, gently touched her hand.
The effect was electric. The woman pulled her whole body away, crying ‘don’t touch me! don’t touch me! That’s physical abuse!’ At this, I laughed — not just at the idea that my five-foot wife, standing on the opposite side of the ticket barrier, had ‘physically abused’ a woman twice her size by touching her with the delicacy of a wren, but at the almost theatrical bile of the woman’s tone, so preposterously out of proportion to the wrong. ‘What are you laughing at?’ ‘You,’ I said, at which point she launched into a tirade — delivered in the same wild tones — about the violence of our intentions. I told her that I hadn’t realised that she was talking to a customer, ‘that doesn’t matter!’ she said, ‘you don’t talk to me like that…’ ‘Alright, alright, just let us through’. ‘Step back, step back!’ she hissed, as if we might pull a gun, and then opened the barriers.
After we had pulled ourselves out into an upper world of serene spring sunshine, we both spontaneously shook ourselves and made energetic ‘brushing’ gestures, laughing at an identical instinct to ritualistically clear away the emotional filth that this demonic creature had covered us in; laughter which was joined by a third chuckle. Behind us was a beggar, an American (oddly; he turned out to be a ‘homeless vet’) who was laughing with us. ‘Dusty in there huh?’ he said. I said it was, but the dust was radioactive hatred. ‘You don’t need that!’ he said, his kind face (bit like Willie Nelson) squinting into the sun behind us, ‘not on a beautiful day like today.’ Too right sir! We chatted for a few moments, I gave him a good donation, for helping us purify ourselves, and we all parted as friends.
The latter experience thus ennobled the former. The darkness of the woman, the argument and the musty underground, followed by the light of the ‘shaking out’, the friendly old geezer and the sun itself: it all meaningfully balanced out, which is why I mention this episode; the whole seemed to make sense in a manner that Mike Leigh’s film (inspired, for all I know, by the same woman) refused to do. The true artist (in this case life itself) raises what is low by unrealistically expressing it, as caricature, perhaps, or as tinged with archetype, or as part of a miraculously balanced whole. The second-rater by contrast brings down what is high, as he brings down everything else; by realistically describing it. Not that Leigh hasn’t elevated his subjects in previous films, but he never raises their lives into anything which even slightly resembles a meaningful whole.
There are countless ways this could have been done in Hard Truths without resorting to the kind of ‘happy ending’ which Leigh, ‘realist’ that he is, refuses to contrive. The film could have been a tragedy, a real tragedy — and, as such, far more terrible than ninety-odd minutes of being punched in the face — but that would have meant providing us with a totality greater than the suffering parts, with divine truth spurned, with irrational truth abandoned, if not Pansy’s truth, then ours, that of a viewer who has to live with so many Pansys. But no. Leigh does not have enough spirit to write a true tragedy. He is, when all is said and done, a pitiless cynic — just look at his eyes, always on the border of a withering put-down — which is why, although he does his best to subject every last trace of sentiment to his refined taste, and purge any last trace of shmaltz from his films, it leaks in. In Another Year it takes the form of an unreal glow of family happiness that unites a husband and wife who, in real life, would detest each other. In Peterloo it creeps in as a sentimentalised working class, singing sad and beautiful songs as they are sadly and beautifully crushed by their demonic overlords. And in Hard Truths it appears as a pretty young girl who — utterly implausibly — approaches Pansy’s miserable, insular, overweight son. But do you see? Ahh. Life is sweet. Or is it? You can read whatever the fuck you like into it!
Perhaps you can, but reality doesn’t care about your readings. It remains as it is, elusive, paradoxical, strange, but absolutely itself, not only unconcerned with what you bring to the cinema of your life, but also intelligent, loving, and brilliant enough to destroy your opinions. The kind of director who has his actors write his films (without credit), then puckishly shrugs away interpretations as one of a constellation of valid attitudes is not showing us this reality, the one we all share, the one that reads us far better than we can ever read it. No, he is showing us his refusal to surrender to it. Perhaps that’s why he wants you to spend an hour and a half in Pansy’s hateful mind? He’s comfortable there. He doesn’t want to get out, and he doesn’t want you to either. He has no love for Pansy, nor for any of his other characters who lead pointless lives, flecked, if at all, by the subtlest and most tasteful touch of reconciliation. He likes to believe that he is gently ribbing his unhappy protagonists, but Dennis Potter was right, he’s sneering at them, or sentimentalising them. Leigh’s ‘distance’ from his characters is that of a cameraman who films baby animals getting massacred, not ‘in order to let nature take its course’, but because he wants to titillate his viewers with authentic slaughter. This callousness is the real hard truth here.
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The hysterical ‘magic realism’ so loved by the professional class can serve the same purpose.
Dennis Potter’s wrote of Abigail’s Party that it was:
…based on nothing more edifying than rancid disdain, for it is a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes.
Leigh waved this away as a symptom of Potter’s deficient understanding (and, strangely, sense of humour), but Leigh knew that Potter — a voice of authority — was right, which is why it lives with him, 40 years later, and why Leigh was more careful, after this, to conceal his ‘rancid disdain’ for socially ambitious characters.