To Leslie is the long-lost, recently rediscovered, classic film that is famous for the inspired, brilliant performance of its star Andrea Riseborough. Despite strong critical reviews, the movie was quietly released way back on October 7, 2022 to a select few theaters and several streaming outlets with little to no publicity. It took in a paltry $27,000 at the box office, before virtually disappearing from public view. Until a few weeks ago.
The movie might well have been overlooked for a lot longer were it not for the last-minute efforts of a number of Hollywood luminaries, actors in particular, praising the film and urging their friends, i.e. voting members of the Academy Awards to see it and to vote for Riseborough for best actress. The celebrity support came from the likes of Jane Fonda, Laura Dern, Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sally Field, Edward Norton, Amy Adams, Kate Winslet and Liam Neeson. Winslet, a pretty great actress in her own right, described Riseborough’s To Leslie work as ”the greatest female performance on screen I have ever seen in my life.” (!) Even Cate Blanchett, the star of Tár, having won the Critics Choice Award for best actress a few weeks ago, praised Riseborough’s performance in her own acceptance speech. And their campaign worked.
To the surprise of almost everyone, when the nominees for the upcoming 95th Academy Awards were announced on January 24th, Riseborough was named one of the five Oscar finalists for best actress - along with Blanchett, Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans), and Ana de Armas (Blonde). The astonished press reaction to this coup is what first brought To Leslie and Riseborough to my attention, and perhaps to yours as well. Conveniently, the film is available to rent or purchase for home viewing on many streaming platforms (see below). Which is how, a few days later, I came to see it.
My take (short version): To Leslie is a very good picture - with Riseborough’s magnificent, indelible performance the best thing about it.
The film starts with local TV news footage of Leslie (Riseborough), a single mother with a 13-year-old son, gleefully screaming and whooping it up – having just learned that she won $190,000 in a local lottery. When the announcer asks what she will do with all this money, Leslie (known as “Lee”) responds, her already exuberant voice rising: “
I don’t know, maybe buy a house, get something for my boy, Have A Better Life!”
Flash forward to six years later. The money is long gone. What Lee actually did, it turns out, was go on a very extended bender, during the course of which her life went to hell. Now, she’s being evicted from a residential motel somewhere, all her belongings stuffed into a pathetic pink suitcase. In an angry, profanity-laced fervor, fueled by shame and indignation, she rants at the management as if her destitution is someone else’s fault. Lee is frightfully thin. All drink and not much food, it seems. She has survived by filching money any way she can, running up and then running out on debts (like rent, in this case), flirting for drinks at small town bars, and such-like. She has burned everyone, and everyone has given up on her: her family, her friends, pretty much all of her home town, even her son James (Owen Teague ). In short, she’s a trainwreck. If she’s not at rock bottom, she is damn close.
Where do you go from there? That’s what the rest of
To Leslie is about. Lee has got a wrinkled paper list of phone numbers – her son, her old friends, Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root) and others that have already been crossed off. She eventually finds herself sleeping outside a low-end motel on the outskirts of her old hometown, where the manager, Sweeney (Marc Maron) takes pity and tries to treat her like a person, rather than as simply another wasted alcoholic. This, for Lee, is a somewhat novel attitude, seeing as most folks nowadays treat her like a piece of shit, and at times she sees herself that way too. So, she’s not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, maybe he’s a sucker to exploit; on the other, maybe his inexplicable kindness offers her a way out of the abyss. Lee is aware, at least sometimes, that she’s dangerously sick; there is yet a piece of her self that wants to change, to get better. The question is: can she do it or will she screw this up, too?
My brief summary may make
To Leslie sound terribly dreary and depressing, but the film itself is not. It is a fascinating character study, as clear-eyed a look at the depths of alcoholism as you’re ever likely to see; but it’s not off-putting – in fact, quite the contrary. I watched this picture with three companions, and we all found it not just interesting but strangely endearing as well, even uplifting. One can credit the production team for some of this: the writing (Ryan Binaco) is good and the direction by veteran television director Michael Morris (helming his first feature film) is deft. The photography of cinematographer Larkin Seiple (also the DP of Oscar contender
Everything Everywhere All at Once) and the music by Linda Perry (best known as the singer and songwriter for 4 Non Blondes, and a prolific songwriter/producer for a slew of other musicians) are unusually well attuned to the story. Speaking of music, the soundtrack is enhanced by some classic, perfectly placed country songs from greats like Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.
In fact, one of the finest and most memorable moments in To Leslie - or, for that matter, in any recent film I’ve seen - results from an exquisite melding of music and motion picture photography roughly halfway through the film. It’s a long slow tracking shot of Lee, sitting at the bar in a saloon at closing time, drunk, alone, at perhaps her lowest point, listening to one of Willie Nelson’s most touching and, in the circumstance, most apt songs, Are You Sure. The shot starts some distance away but closes in on Lee, isolating her thin, disconsolate face, thinking about the mess she’s made of things, as Willie sings
Please don’t let my tears persuade you
I’d hoped I wouldn’t cry
Although lately teardrops seem a part of me
Look around you, and take a good look
At all the local used-to-bes
Are you sure this is where you want to be?
Are you sure this is where you want to be?Ultimately, though, the success and impact of
To Leslie derives from Riseborough's brilliant performance. With a lesser actor, the movie would be pretty good, but not great. She lifts the picture to another level. In my recent review of
Tár – another film carried to a large degree on the shoulders of its lead actress, I cited Anthony Lane's admiring description of Cate Blanchette's artistry as “burning with a cool flame.” In
To Leslie, Riseborough, as Lee, is burning a lot hotter, more like a firecracker. It’s an astonishingly brave, honest, committed, totally credible performance. It is also a demanding one, given the arc of Lee’s journey and her mercurial emotional temperament - ranging from callous to sentimental, melancholy to upbeat, vulnerable to courageous, mendacious to brutally honest, reckless to steadfast, seductive to predatory, drunkenly exuberant to soberly thoughtful.
[As an aside, and speaking of versatility, I must note that while both Blanchette who’s Australian , and Riseborough, who’s English, have both convincingly played Americans in movies, it is hard to imagine Blanchette pulling off a hardscrabble Southern white working class alcoholic, like Riseborough does in this film!]
Riseborough’s Oscar nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role may have been unexpected, but it is no fluke. She has most definitely earned it. The rest of the ensemble is also excellent, particularly Marc Maron, Allison Janney and Owen Teague.
You definitely should check this one out.
1 hour 59 minutes Rated R – “for language throughout and some drug use”
Grade: A- for the film as a whole; and A for Riseborough’s performance
Available for rent [$6.99 at this writing] on most pay-per-view streaming services, including AppleTV, Amazon and several others.
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