Yahoo Lifestyle The Ferociously Talented Marianne Jean-Baptiste
Early in the new Mike Leigh film Hard Truths, actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste delivers a ferocious monologue about the uselessness of the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals. “It’s ridiculous,” her character Pansy repeats, over and over, her voice becoming tighter as she barely gulps for air. What starts as an everyday complaint about the annoyance of people fundraising for charity on the street becomes a soaring aria of bad-tempered nonsense. “RSPCA stands for animals”, her beaten down son provides, meekly, to which Jean-Baptiste snaps, “I know that!”. It’s a darkly funny moment in a bleakly humorous film about the trickiest of artistic subjects–a truly difficult woman.
Mike Leigh’s films are famous for their extensive rehearsal process–the actors and Leigh work together to build and refine characters and dialogue.
To work this way requires an extraordinary level of artistic trust between the actress and the director. Jean-Baptiste has worked with Leigh off and on since the ‘90s. She wrote parts of the score to one of his earliest films, another exploration of prickly women and relationships, 1997’s Career Girls. “(Leigh) trusts that when I'm going to go into a project, I'm not going to have an agenda. It’s really gonna come from the truth of the character because we are invested in making things as real as possible. We know it's a drama. We know that there's gonna be a heightened quality to it, but we want it to feel as real as possible.”
“When you work with Mike in the process, you go in with a list of people you know from life,” Jean-Baptiste explains to me on a video call. “You'll try and merge those people together into one character. And then you start building a new character from that point.”
Pansy, as played by Jean-Baptiste, is thoroughly unlikable. She isn’t ever concerned with being agreeable, but she is concerned with being correct. Like Mike Leigh’s other dramas Happy Go Lucky, Another Year and his masterpiece that introduced audiences to Jean-Baptiste nearly 30 years ago, Secrets and Lies, Hard Truths is concerned with the everyday interactions of a fallible character. In Secrets and Lies, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste created the delicately wistful, melancholy character of Hortense Cumberbatch, a young Black optometrist adopted at birth, who must contend with the discovery that her birth mother is a working-class, white British woman. The performance was a revelation, garnering a best supporting actress Oscar nod for Jean-Baptiste, the first Black British actress to receive such a nomination. Three decades later, the two have created Pansy, a woman who wears her rage as armor; terrorizes her husband, son, sisters and nieces with her sharp tongue and leans fully into the most taboo of Western cultural myths, the angry Black woman. “Mike is in charge of all of the things that are out of an individual's power, and I am in charge of the things that are,” she says. “For example, I can decide (if the character) does this math test, she really loves maths, she works really hard. He decides whether she passes it or not. All of the disappointment, heartbreak, and stuff like that comes from him. I might not have chosen some of the outcomes that she has in her history.”
Pansy has a lot to be angry about: her marriage is lonely; she’s frustrated with her son; she has no close friends. But Pansy’s anger, even as it is funny, isn’t especially noble or redeeming. In a lot of art that explores Black female rage, the connections to systemic problems are made explicit–either elegantly in masterpieces like Beloved or in ham-fisted ways like in the camp horror classic Ma. Hard Truths explores how most of us actually experience rage–a hot flash directed at those who are closest to us, a deeply personal emotion. The film understands that as much as rage can be righteous and motivating, it can also profoundly disturb the balance of a familial ecosystem in ways that feel impossible to recover. Throughout the movie, a fox keeps appearing in Pansy’s backyard. The sight of the animal enrages her, but her rage is useless. There’s nothing she can do to intimidate something wild, there is no confrontation to be had. It’s something Pansy cannot control and it sends her into histrionics. She screams at her husband to contain it, even as he is unsure what to do.
I am speaking to Jean-Baptiste on January 8th, the night of the New York Critics Circle awards gala, where her performance in Hard Truths earned her the Best Actress award. She has been nominated this season for numerous critics awards, including the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, both of which she won.
Jean-Baptiste is wearing enormous, statement eyeglasses, round frames a la Iris Apfel. I’ve spent the past few days re-watching her performance as Pansy, so it's a bit of a shock to see her face now on screen, open and sunny, a smiling woman who likes to slip jokes into conversation.
It is in stark contrast to how Pansy presents herself. The character dresses not for personal expression or style or even comfort, but to prove that she is correct. “It was bland. But also, in her mind, classic,” Jean-Baptiste laughs. Her own personal style is more eclectic. “I'm more into style than I am fashion. I like Dries van Noten, I love Alexander McQueen. I just look at shapes that I really like, the irregular shapes.” Working closely on wardrobe is part of the process for a Leigh film. “There was a sort of faux Chanel jacket from Zara, with the gold buttons going down the front. We tried a couple on, and one was a bit snug.” Jean-Baptiste kept the smaller size because, she reasoned, “if Pansy was a size 6 when she bought it, she would be like, I'm still a size 6. And she would squeeze herself in, you know? That's how precise it was.”
Pansy could easily be reduced to pathology, especially in our current culture, obsessed with diagnosing and cataloging personalities. In the earliest scenes in the film, she’s seen angrily wiping down her spotless leather sofa with disinfectant. “Their clean isn’t my clean!” she announces, later. She could have obsessive-compulsive disorder; borderline personality disorder or unprocessed trauma. As I watched the film, I was sure there would be an audience for this movie that would be obsessed with diagnosing Pansy. Jean-Baptiste’s performance is remarkable because it renders that impulse irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter what Pansy’s pathology may or may not be. What matters is experiencing the world through her lens. “She's also 57 years of age,” Jean-Baptiste points out. “She comes from a culture and background that are not going to sort of go, Oh, my kid doesn't like going out to play. I'm gonna take her to the doctor. They're gonna say, get on with it. That's been her life. She's learned to sort of just get on. And this is how she gets on. This is how she deals with not liking people or being around people.”
Pansy is a heroine for our times–an age where we should justifiably be angry with so much about the world, but so many of us instead suffuse that energy into the swamp of everyday pettiness. For Jean-Baptiste, the most difficult part of playing Pansy was “That voice! That was the hardest thing to shut her voice up, complaining about stuff the whole time,” she laughs again. “I enjoy life. Pansy doesn't.”
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