To Leslie ★★★★
(M) 119 minutes
You may have heard that the English actress Andrea Riseborough gives a great performance in this low-budget indie American film, the debut of experienced television director Michael Morris. You may also have heard that her nomination for an Oscar was somehow irregular because a lot of famous names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Adams, Jane Fonda, Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet got behind a last-minute push.
Andrea Riseborough deserves her Oscar nomination for best actress for her role in To Leslie.
What you may not have heard is that there is a racial undertone to the kerfuffle. Riseborough beat out a couple of highly fancied black actresses. In Till, Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie Till, mother of the murdered 15-year-old boy Emmett Till. She missed out on a nomination, although singling out Riseborough for criticism is hardly fair. Every Oscar nomination has a campaign behind it. Riseborough’s camp could not even afford an ad in the trades, so they used word of mouth from famous friends. There’s nothing irregular or wrong with that: Harvey Weinstein used to spend millions to secure a nomination and nobody complained about his craven methods.
And it is true – this is one helluva performance by an actress who deserves her place in the front rank. It would be a travesty if the Oscar voters had not recognised this work.
Riseborough plays an alcoholic single mother who once won a small-town lottery worth $190,000. An opening scene shows her in a news clip as a spirited young woman screaming with joy about her win. She cuddles her son, who’s about 12, and declares she’ll buy a house and a guitar for James, who wants to be “the next Waylon”, as in Jennings.
Owen Teague and Andrea Riseborough play an estranged mother and son in To Leslie.
Six years later, Leslie is busted flat, unable to pay her rent in a flophouse motel in Texas. She hops the bus to her son in Los Angeles, but she can’t stay sober, so James – who’s 20 and hasn’t seen her since he was 14 – sends her back to Texas, to the people she hates most in the world. Allison Janney and Stephen Root are oddly but effectively cast as a rough biker couple, Nancy and Dutch, who took care of the son when Leslie abandoned him. When Leslie returns to her hometown, Nancy pours derision on her, making her feel even more worthless.
The first half of the movie is hard work. The bleak settings, the absolute pain of watching Leslie unravel becomes enervating, and Morris stretches it out. The film has a real-time rhythm and long takes that leave us nowhere to hide. It’s tough, watching her fall from one degradation to another. Morris does this so that the last act will bring the story home like a train, and so it does.
Riseborough’s performance is spectacular – a high-wire act, from despair to repair and everywhere in between. The cruelty of those around her is only matched by her rock-bottom self-esteem. She is quick to anger, slow to understand her own predicament, self-pitying and potty-mouthed. It’s a long way back and nobody believes she can make it. Until one night…
To Leslie is in selected cinemas from March 9.
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