Film Review - To Leslie
Images courtesy of Kismet.
Of the nominations for this Monday’s 95th Academy Awards, easily the most controversial went to Andrea Riseborough, who was nominated for Best Actress for her performance in To Leslie. The film opens in Australian Cinemas tomorrow, and flew largely under the radar in 2022, as did Riseborough’s performance in it. So when more acclaimed, widely-seen performances by Black actresses such as Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till) went unrecognised, the Academy – which has faced more than its share of accusations of racial bias – was heavily criticised. Also at issue was the film’s unprecedented campaigning techniques: namely the full-throated praise from many established celebrity actors, to the extent of hosting screenings of the film for Academy voters.
Largely lost amongst the controversy, however, are the merits of the film itself. To Leslie is a very old-fashioned human drama; a straightforward character study with modest ambitions and a complete disinterest in modern trappings of spectacle, metacommentary, or narrative obfuscation. To say it is successful in its aims as a traditional drama may depend on your patience for its more hackneyed story elements, but it certainly only benefits from comparison to many contemporary films and their failure to nail the fundamentals of effective storytelling.
Riseborough’s eponymous Leslie is a down-and-out West Texas woman whose life is dominated by her alcoholism. The film opens on a seemingly life-changing moment for her: news footage of her having just won the lottery, an enormous novelty cheque for $190,000 in hand, and her 14-year-old son James behind her. Flashing six years forward, however, Leslie has spent away all of the money on booze and fast times: she is homeless, penniless, and entirely estranged from James. The film follows her as she bounces from living situation to living situation, and the relationships that are put under strain each time as Leslie’s drinking pushes the boundaries of people’s charity. We see these boundaries tested with James, with a kindly stranger named Sweeney (a gravelly Marc Maron); and most interestingly of all, with Dutch and Nance, a biker couple and old friends of Leslie’s played by Stephen Root and Allison Janney, be their presences ever so reassuring.
Dutch and Nance, or Nancy, represent both sides of Leslie’s tragic story. Through clever storytelling, the audience comes to realise they have suffered enough of her alcohol-fuelled chaos to hold friendship-threatening grudges against her, and yet they were also there, benefiting and enabling, as Leslie poured her lottery fortune down the drain. Janney in particular manages to imbue Nancy with simultaneous snark and righteousness, a feat that will surprise no-one familiar with her body of work.
However compelling or crucial the ensemble players may or may not be, a film like this rises and falls on Riseborough in the central role. She’s excellent (god, imagine the scale of the controversy if she wasn’t), and elevates the entire project by an order of magnitude. Riseborough does a lot with her face when Leslie is drunk – the slackness of her mouth, her tongue – we can instantly see it, we understand why and how she cannot shake herself of this self-destructiveness. What the performance gets so crucially right is the ugliness of addiction, and the desperation that results when a person sees it in themself.
The film is, again, not especially original, and perhaps a little long. Director Michael Morris worked on and produced Better Call Saul, this is his feature debut – while his inclination for contained feature-film conventional neatness is questionable, his consistent character-narrative focus is an asset that’s easy to underestimate (he also just creates some very pretty images, along with cinematographer Larkin Seiple: one bar Leslie frequents is a wonder of neon lighting). While critiques fly about To Leslie’s well-trodden storytelling paths, I’ve got nothing but time for a film that’s interested in the subtleties of human interaction: the way James instinctively knows when Leslie has bummed a drink off his neighbour, the glint in Sweeney’s eye when he finds Leslie taking initiative one day. It’s rock-solid stuff.
To Leslie is screening in cinemas from Thursday 9th March. For tickets and more info, click here.