Hard Truths marks Mike Leigh’s long-awaited return to his natural habitat of the contemporary suburb - and also his return to entirely from-scratch material since 2010’s Another Year, without historical guideposts (as in Mr Turner and Peterloo) structuring the work.
One standout scene shortly after the film’s midpoint sees Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and her extended family gather for Mother’s Day lunch. Those familiar with Leigh’s films, which often culminate with an implosive family get-together, might have expected this to form the climax - we’re certainly primed to expect the worst by Pansy’s constant outbursts - but this is something different. Pansy is, for once, silent. The Deacon family each fall into their practised freeze-responses as time grinds to a halt, until the tension is finally broken by Pansy’s outpouring of choked laughter and tears. It’s a scene of such rare, quiet force, why are its qualities - stillness, subtraction, opacity - so seldom seen on our cinema screens?
Although much has been said about Leigh’s process with actors over the years, perhaps less discussed is his approach to narrative construction. One way to look at his work is through a distinction he has sometimes made in interviews between causal plots and cumulative ones. To paraphrase (and oversimplify): a strongly causal plot would treat its constituent scenes as steps in a chain reaction (think of films with well-defined external stakes such as action movies, thrillers, legal or political dramas) while a strongly cumulative plot (perhaps its most familiar form is the “character study”, of which Hard Truths is a fine example) takes on dramatic freight through more independent episodes via an emotional or thematic throughline.
These approaches aren’t irreconcilable; more or less any narrative film will naturally include both causal and cumulative aspects, the distinction being largely a matter of emphasis and extent. Genre films with causal plots often suspend narrative momentum to luxuriate in set pieces, whether of the comic or spectacular sort. Leigh’s films tend strongly towards the cumulative, though not without exception - Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake and Peterloo each coalesce around complex scenarios involving more elaborate chains of cause and effect.
However, causal plotting is undoubtedly the dominant mode of narrative construction. It’s the kind mainstream audiences are primarily trained to enjoy, and the one largely prescribed in screenwriting pedagogy. While its pleasures are obvious - even undeniable - the priority of chain-linked causality over other forms of construction positions films above all as narrative machines, and only incidentally as vehicles to explore situations, images, people, places, or ideas as objects of interest in their own right. (It is the supremacy of the causal plot that leads to criticism such as that found in the Times Literary Supplement’s review of Leigh’s 1990 film Life is Sweet: “[the film] remains static and anecdotal, its unit the scene, not the complete story”.)
While the cumulative approach certainly has its own trade-offs (it requires simpler plotlines, due to the limited informational bandwidth of temporal media such as film), its great strength lies in its freedom to treat the scene as an inviolable unit. This is something distinct from - though not incompatible with - the tendencies of the slow cinema genre. While slow cinema aims for immersion in the present moment through pace (often through the unbroken shot, foregrounding the pictorial over the narrative) the cumulative plot is not defined by tempo but time’s orientation. Rather than merely existing to propel us forward, the cumulative scene is permitted a real sense of the present tense - of a moment unfolding according to its own impetus, not necessarily in proportion to its expository value to the whole.
Leigh’s development methods are of course crucial to this quality in his work. The film is grown like an organism; characters are conceived with the cast, and the substance of the drama brought into being through extended improvisation and rehearsal, scene by scene, sequence by sequence. Without a predetermined structure (though one naturally forms as the work takes shape), it is the immediate circumstances - both internal and external - that dictate what happens, not a foregone conclusion that is being worked back from. As a result, Leigh’s films are marked by a lack of knowingness, privileging techne - the method of producing a work, faith in process - over its consummative telos.
This is a far cry from scenarios constructed under the dictum of “the ending is the conceit”, from the top-down perspective of outlines or beat-sheets, in which the individual scene serves as a means to transfer dramatic energies from one state to the next with optimal economy. This emphasis in the causal plot on anticipatory pleasures - what will happen over what is happening now - can render the present moment barren. If no given moment is as important as what it leads to, why stop to smell the roses? The film becomes a highway; a series of arrows impelling one forward. If the causal plot is a straight line with its meaning defined in large part by its outcome, Leigh’s films instead seem to emanate from a point of origin and ripple outwards, accumulating layers of meaning as they go.
A particularly striking example takes place towards the end of Naked (1993) when, sitting on his ex-girlfriend’s bathroom floor, Johnny (David Thewlis) uses a bottle of Frish to mime scanning barcodes on her hands and forehead, referring back not only to his gnostic ravings about the Book of Revelation and subcutaneous implants, but also to Brian the security guard’s tracking “gizmo”. It’s a moment of no dramatic necessity, but an entirely organic one - essentially a private joke, laden with religious, futurist, and absurdist overtones - impossible to imagine being achieved through conventional means.
The cumulative plot also permits the introduction of that crucial aspect of life - chance - into the dramatic structure. Late in their runtimes, both Hard Truths and Life is Sweet feature workplace accidents which bring family dynamics to the boil, while Career Girls is partly structured around various coincidental run-ins with characters from the past - the sort of phenomena which govern our lives, but are generally excluded from film narratives, lest they undermine the primacy of domino effects. While many causal plots posit a clockwork universe, Leigh’s films take place in the stochastic world in which we really live.
These properties are unlikely to be merely incidental to Leigh’s method. Though not often discussed as a metaphysically-inclined filmmaker - he’s more often conflated in the public consciousness with the social realism of Ken Loach, ignoring their stark differences - Leigh’s interest in time is longstanding. Some of his lesser known works traffic in diachronically playful structures, such as Career Girls which interlaces sequences of its characters as dishevelled undergraduates and disillusioned twenty-somethings, or his play It’s a Great Big Shame! which revisits its East End setting a century hence after its act break. Perhaps most illustrative of this preoccupation is the extended discussion on the very substance of time in Naked between modern-day flâneur Johnny and security guard Brian (Peter Wight), who lives in a fantasised future:
“The only thing wrong with the present is the bastard doesn’t exist. Because the present is the future, and the future is the past, and it’s all the same bag of bones anyway. It’s a constant process of coming into being and passing away… the future is now.”
“But the present does exist. We’re in it now.”
“You were just then when you said it. But you’re not in it now, you’re not in it now, you’re not in it now.”
But the sheer weight of time is arguably never felt more strongly than in Leigh’s first feature film, Bleak Moments (1971), which features excruciatingly distended scenes of failed seduction, and a more or less total denial of catharsis. It is at this more extreme end of the cumulative plot that we begin to approach (that crime held against Life is Sweet in its TLS review) stasis. While often considered antithetical to drama in the world of film-as-entertainment, the use of stasis opens the door to explore the kinds of abysses that are central to life, and yet - by their very nature - so challenging to capture in narrative art. (One might here consider the influence of Leigh’s most cited antecedent, Ozu - another andante filmmaker - whose use of “pillow shots” as structuring absences seem to illustrate that principle so crucial to his thought that it marks his gravestone; mu, or “nothingness”.)
Stasis can be found not only in Leigh’s approach to dramatic construction, but also at the heart of some of his most resonant characterisations. Just as in life, Leigh’s characters cast about for purpose, unable to articulate what they want. For some, stasis is the fundament of depression. “Nothing changes,” mutters Imelda Staunton’s Janet early in Another Year - given the lie as the slow turning of the earth brings death, new birth and the incremental tightening and easing of assorted quiet struggles. In other cases, this inertia stems from political alienation. Protracted unemployment under Thatcher has dissipated the youth’s purpose in 1983’s Meantime, most starkly in skinhead Coxy (Gary Oldman), who is last seen mindlessly thrashing in an overturned construction barrel. By Leigh’s own description, Naked implies the failure of the education system to give independent-minded working class men such as Johnny a possible future to project themselves into. Tellingly, it is often the characters with the least momentum who have the most to say for themselves - Johnny and his logorrheic tirades, Pansy’s alexithymic fury, Nicola’s maladroit political posturing in Life is Sweet - in frantic efforts to justify their entrenchment.
Although Leigh is far from alone in operating in this mode, his body of work stands as a reminder of the riches offered by narrative forms relatively untapped by modern commercial cinema. In the current media landscape, with data streams so accelerated as to make the hallmarks of intensified continuity circa the early 2000s seem almost quaint, where television is ceding attentional ground to the phone, it perhaps behoves filmmakers to make a claim for something different for the cinema (maybe it is no accident that a film as pointedly static as Jeanne Dielmann achieved such ascendency during the interval in which social media secured its hold on our minds). While the eager arrow of the causal plot may never lose its dominance, we will always need new forms to explore life’s obscurer byways - and certain avenues become invisible when we blow past them too quickly. Faster is not the only way forward.