Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths” are indeed hard truths, painful as can be. This great British director as always goes his own way. The camera circles a house, a modest, neat North London house, and the family. There are human struggles in that family that come from deep places, struggles that make the Sean Bakers and Ruben Ostlunds of cinema look like tinsel glitz and contrivance. There is necessity here. This time, it is a lower-middle-class Black West Indian family (though Leigh says human, not Black or white, and that is how it feels). A mother, Pansy, (the perfect Marianne Jean-Baptiste of his earlier “Secrets and Lies”) with an almost Shakespearean flow of language, who is all vituperation and desperation, raging at the imperfection of the world, howling in her solitude. And funny! How does he find so much room for wit and humor? The child she has produced, Moses, (perfect name somehow) 22, grossly overweight, beautiful face, filling his mouth in an effort to fill an empty place where love should have been. Picked on of course, not savagely but badly enough, and unable to fight for himself at all, adrift in his isolation and passivity. And the struggling father, the plumbing business metaphor of the heavy and ever harder burdens he stoically carries, in the form of radiators and bathtubs, to the very end of his capacity to do so. Each one sitting isolated in anguish, unable to help each other. Impasse, Mike Leigh confronting it bare, though the son at least is given a final chance of possible escape, thankfully. Leigh’s work is like Bergman’s, coming out of a deep place of family disfunction, that he turns into a rich song, full of hurt and hilarity and taking all variety of imaginative variations over the years—the early sweet socialist couple of “High Hopes,” all the wonderful artists, Mr. Turner, Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy Turvy, and their glorious art making—but at the heart of it, profound pain and an equally deep compassion for the suffering. Maybe Leigh’s limited budget this time forced him to pare down his scope, his ambition, but the paring down takes us to the bone, and I find myself more deeply moved by this film—and far more admiring of it—than anything else in the festival.
What is amazing about this film is that it perfectly balances a continuous laugh-out-loud delivery with domestic emotional devastation, a knife-edge experience of hilarity and something close to tragedy, that Leigh has given us before but never so powerfully. Pansy, the central figure, is so ferociously hostile that she creates turmoil (and laughter for the audience) wherever she goes, on supermarket lines where she insults everyone around her, in the doctor’s office and the dentist’s chair, not to speak of what she does to her family—of which she is aware. The quotidien sources of her distress are not unfamiliar, our lives all have some knowledge of these hard truths. To her son, “you’re wasting your life away,” and when he leaves the remainder of his peanut butter and jam lunch, “I’m not your servant,” said with as much harsh bitterness as possible. The further the rants are pushed—why do babies need pockets?—the more they bring laughter. But it is as if Leigh has taken every time one has been overcritical, too demanding, hyper sensitive, appalled by the world’s idiocies large and small, and spent every minute responding in ferocious attack mode. When she wakes from sleep, it is with a terrified howl. Those around her, her family, are extraordinarily kind—or in the case of her husband and son, broken into silent submission by her onslaughts. Husband Curtley (David Webber), plumber, has a face so weathered and mournful and forbearing that you could weep just looking at it. The son (a very effective Tuwaine Barrett) is particularly poignant, and while she scolds him for doing nothing with his life except taking walks, she sees what she has done to him and says to her sister. What chance did he have? That sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), is a wonderful creation too, totally different, an empathetic, cheerful hairdresser, whose workplace life is sweetly rendered as various women—beauticians and clients—share jokes, sexy gossip, wisdom. Life is not easy for her either, but she just “gets on with it.” A single mother of two young women, all have fun in each other’s company. And though the daughters are struggling too, they appear to be on their way to relatively successful adult work lives. Chantelle is on the side of life, and the balcony of her council flat is artistic/messy and full of plants and color, while Pansy’s backyard is bare. We get minimal back story as to why Pansy turned out so very differently, but in reality it is enough. As Pansy says, the two may have had one mother, but they essentially were raised by two different mothers—a situation many know. In a touching encounter with her sister at their mother’s gravesite, Pansy says (I paraphrase): She chose you, she never supported me. When I was very young she would say O Pansy, why can’t you go out and play? Why can’t you enjoy your life? And Pansy says in anguish, she herself doesn’t know why. She answers: “Haunted, haunted.” While the film catapults you several times from laughter into near tears, Mike Leigh is careful to avoid sentimentality. If the film connects one so searingly to this woman’s pain and extreme loneliness—lonely when they are there, lonely when they are not, she says—at the same time it has one of her nieces rightly say, indignant, to kindly sister Chantelle, about Pansy: “Everything is about her.” And then there is the stunning conclusion. The film itself is looking for the human truth, and as always in Leigh’s work, there is empathy extended to all, even the worst of us. Mike Leigh is a unique master, a giant, a rare richly humanistic voice in current cinema.
In “The Friend,” directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee from a National Book Award-winning novel by Sigrid Nunez, Naomi Watts plays a writer who has just lost Walter, a close friend (once her writing teacher and, briefly, lover) to suicide and who reluctantly inherits his Great Dane, a huge animal she has no room for in her small New York City apartment or in her life. Watts is an attractive protagonist, and it is a pleasurable film, with a smart female voiceover; a memorial service full of ex-wives, widow, daughter, literary people saying the kinds of things they do at such events; brief scenes of the writing class she teaches; shots of the Greenwich Village building she lives in, the surrounding streets and park—that are actually places I have known and lived around for half a century, looking much cleaner and spiffier somehow than in real life, but a treat to see throughout the film. But obviously this film will be most enthusiastically received by dog people, since so much of it is involved with Apollo, the Great Dane, his grief for his master, his power struggles with his ambivalent new owner, her sympathy for and sharing in his mourning, the dogs in the park’s dog run, on the streets, everywhere, celebrated and glorified in this dog-besotted city and movie. A too-long film for me, for what it is, but nicely done and enjoyable.
“Nickel Boys” was honored as this year’s opening film for the festival, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. Director RaMell Ross, a documentary director making his first fiction film, chose an experimental mode of narration that eschews chronological order in telling the painful story of a southern Black boy, Elwood, played by Ethan Herisse. Elwood, cherished by his grandmother and with the highest hopes for a good life as he heads off to technical college, accidentally falls into the hands of police and then a delinquents reform school, modeled on a real place in 1960s Florida. We watch through poetically associative images—moving back and forth through time, moving from one boy’s point of view to the other’s—how for years Elwood and his close friend Turner (Brandon Wilson) are held captive. Though they are repeatedly tormented in the state’s attempt to break them (which they survive and get to live a life), the director decided not to include outright acts of violence or racial slurs, feeling that vicious beatings and ugly, humiliating curses have become almost clichés in the telling of such stories. Ross, coming from documentary filmmaking and other kinds of visual expression, hoped through a collage-like flow to find a fresher, deeper way to convey what befell Ellwood. But this unusual approach makes the film difficult to follow—though the last half hour I found deeply stirring in its impact.
A director very often included in the annual NYFF is the great Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. His latest, “The Room Next Door,” another film this year adapted from a Sigrid Nunez novel, is his first feature film entirely in English (which makes for some stilted dialogue early on, despite the terrific performances of his two central actresses, American Julianne Moore and British Tilda Swinton). The film is quieter than is his usual mode, in keeping with the material with which he is working. Now 74, Almodovar in several of his most recent films, like “Pain and Glory,” has been taking on the subjects of aging, sickness, death—and given his emotional honesty, and given the realities of one’s own long life, one is grateful that he does not turn away from these subjects that most other filmmakers prefer not to deal with. At the same time, those recent films are rich with life. This one concerns a woman with terminal cancer, a war correspondent, Martha, played with dignity and calm by Swinton, who has decided to end her own life with an illegal pill rather than face pointless anxiety and prolonged pain, after submitting to the torture of a new therapy that in the end didn’t work. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a writer at a booksigning in a New York Rizzoli bookstore for her new book, which is about her fear of death and her refusal to accept that we all must die, learns that her old friend, whom she hasn’t seen in years, is in the hospital. The film is above all about the relationship between these friends, Ingrid in spite of her terror agreeing to accompany Martha to some place apart and be nearby (in the next room) when she decides to end it. She listens; she stays near and close; the empathy is quiet and real. As Almodovar said in the press conference, sometimes empathy is the best you can do for a friend. Almodovar has always gravitated to women characters and has always been very strong and sensitive in his treatment of them (Penelope Cruz repeatedly his muse), and that is certainly true here. The locales are as always distinctive, especially the final place they move to: a startling modernistic structure of a set of geometric shapes, cubes, up a wooded hill (which the film locates in upstate New York but Almodovar said was actually filmed in Spain). There are interesting set pieces: the sad story of Martha’s husband, a tragic victim of wartime mental injury who dies young; the daughter to whom Martha has no relation; Ingrid’s new interest in the love between Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington and the very gay writer Lytton Strachey; a former boyfriend (John Turturro) consumed (rightly) by climate change and the fact that our world is dying of it. That the film is built around the choice to end one’s life for medically rational reasons is in itself brave. Every year the New York State Senate is asked to vote to make such actions legal, as a dozen other states have done, and every year it is refused. Refused no doubt by state senators who are like the sanctimonious fierce (perhaps rigidly Catholic) policeman (played by Alessandro Nivola) in the film who questions Ingrid so nastily and accusingly after Martha’s death. Shaken, she says afterward that “he treated me like I was a killer.” The woman lawyer’s answer: “What an asshole.” A very brief scene, but it tells us passionately where the film stands. Color means everything in Almodovar’s films, and Ingrid in this scene wears a very bright, very green turtleneck. Books, art, and movies are referenced all through the film: Hopper’s “People in Sun,” perfectly chosen; Bergman’s “Persona”; Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy”; Keaton; John Huston’s “The Dead, from James Joyce’s great story “The Dead,” the magnificent ending of which is quoted three times in the film (the snow general all over Ireland, faintly falling upon all the living and the dead). Asked if his work is political, Almodovar answers that a human story becomes political because there are messages of hate everywhere, and this (namely film, namely art) stands against all that. He carries this message, of the all-importance of art, in his soul, a vision revered in an earlier generation, which I too revere and which (despite signs to the contrary) I hope somehow manages to live on—beyond Mike Leigh and Pedro Almodovar, the two master Humanist directors of our time, they and Bergman are the best our time has produced, the deepest, the most human. It is grotesque that “Hard Truths” was not even accepted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is the film that should have gotten top prize. That Leigh, now 82, has his next film in mind but is finding it hard to raise money for it is also shocking. There should be a massive MacArthur genius-like grant for this director—with 50 years of filmmaking behind him—to work completely freely, without money worries, to make whatever films and however many more he wishes to and can make. Leigh is a British national treasure—as the British keep churning out their empty, tricky pieces like “Downton Abbey” and “Midsommer Murders.” Sean Baker names Mike Leigh as one of a handful of directors he most looks to; he also says he needs to reach a young audience by whatever means so he can continue to say the real things, the important things, to the largest possible number. But now that the Cannes award has given him such legitimacy, he better be careful not to lose his way entirely to sensationalism and glitz, and to such “Parasite”-like crudeness as having one of the hoods in Anora vomit massively in a car, disgust, humor, for no reason but to get a rise out of and keep the attention of the young. Alas, that is what the great citadel of cinema, Cannes, is now opting for. For Mike Leigh to be overlooked is a crime in my eyes.
British director Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” given the honor of last film of the festival, deals with the 1940 heavy Nazi bombing of London—a period and a national trauma that has lived on vividly in British memory for many decades. The film has extraordinary power when it deals with huge terrible events: the opening conflagration of streets; loud, percussive sound; fire filling the screen; men struggling with hoses to contain the flames. And after establishing the family that is central to the film by a quick pan to the boy, George, nine years old, his so loving white single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and his grandfather, we hear the first of the sirens that sound through the film, and we see the large numbers of terrified people fleeing their homes to shelter in the underground, fighting to be let in, how it must have looked and felt, a sight extremely moving. These Blitz scenes are brilliantly designed and enacted and bring me close to tears. We learn that people had to mount a fight to get the government to open the deep underground subways as shelters. And occasionally, but too briefly, we get to feel the terror of sitting huddled as the hugely loud sounds of bombs falling nearby cause terror to all.
However, McQueen is much less effective when he gets involved with characters. We never get close to—or even have any real sense of—any characters other than the one family (and hardly them), when the film could have shown a range of how lives throughout society were impacted by the Blitz, and relationships of sorts could have been sketched in different people’s encounters with one another during the underground waits. Instead, McQueen works essentially with one very simple plot line: the boy running away, refusing to be separated from his mother for the evacuation of children enacted throughout England’s cities, as well as his fleeing the nasty racism of other children toward this biracial boy. So, McQueen fills the film with action: jumping off the train, other derring-do acts to make his way back, physical feats, heroic acts, near capture by police, his being used by an East End Fagin-like criminal ring—a picaresque adventure movie. Fast-moving action, pretty much all the Black characters idealized, and characterizations generally simplistic, catchy song and dance interspersed with the action, aimed at a large popular audience. For me, given that this is a director with an incredible visual sense, beautiful framing of images, boldness of scope, enormous ambition—given all that, this seems to me, despite some powerful evocations, a missed opportunity and a disappointment.
