Ruminate on the title of the latest film from acclaimed British writer-director Mike Leigh, “Hard Truths,” and you’ll find it's comically ironic. Leigh’s movies have always relied on their titles to convey their contents plainly. Take 2008’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” about a perennial optimist whose cheery disposition irks everyone around her; or 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” a tale of hidden secrets and — you guessed it! — lies. And though their titles may be frank, their stories are anything but. Leigh’s are uncomplicated films about incredibly complicated people, which is why calling his newest “Hard Truths” produces a chuckle: Sure, this is a movie about realities that are difficult to accept, but Leigh has been sharply focused on the hard truths of human life for his entire career.
In that respect, calling the film “Hard Truths” almost implies a well-earned victory lap for a filmmaker who has dedicated his work to elucidating the complexities of the human condition, especially because the movie also finds Leigh reuniting with one of his foremost collaborators in Marianne Jean-Baptiste. The two worked together in a play Leigh put up in 1993, and again in “Secrets & Lies,” which earned Jean-Baptiste an Oscar nomination for her quietly stirring work as a young woman pursuing the identity of her birth mother. The same year she was nominated for an Oscar, Jean-Baptiste wrote the score and original songs for Leigh’s follow-up, “Career Girls.” Theirs is the kind of fruitful artistic partnership that is more reliant on the work to tell the story of their intimate connection and trust, rather than any sort of conventional glamour and reverence you’d see heaped onto a director and their muse a tad closer to Hollywood.
