The opening credit sequence of Michael Morris’ “To Leslie” is a real roller coaster ride, and thus appropriate preparation for the emotional turmoil to follow. We meet the title character (Andrea Riseborough) via a series of photos, mostly family snapshots: happy memories, a young woman coming of age, getting married, having a baby. And then the mood shifts, to stark close-ups of bruises on her face – police evidence photos. The images that follow, of drunkenness and poverty, are increasingly desperate, but interrupted by joy. Leslie wins the lottery, a $195,000 jackpot, and when the TV reporter asks what she wants, she responds, “JUST HAVE A BETTER LIFE!” before turning to the assembled gawkers with an ominous announcement: “Drinks are on me!”
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Because Leslie drinks, and not casually. Her condition recalls a line by the late, great stand-up comedian Robin Harris: “I’m not an alcoholic. I’m a drunk. Alcoholics gotta go to them goddamn meetings!” In a jarring jump, Morris hard-cuts to six years later, and Leslie’s luck has long run out: she’s getting kicked out of a seedy motel for non-payment, and she wanders from door to door, screaming and pleading for any help at all, which she does not get. In absolute desperation, she reaches out to her estranged 20-year-old son, James (Owen Teague). “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” he asks, equal parts fear and hesitancy.
Already, “To Leslie” has been A Lot, and it’s just getting warmed up. The picture is episodic in nature, because lives like Leslie’s are like that – a constant cycle of second (and third, and fourth) chances, and promises made and broken, until she wears out her welcome and moves on to the next person who might give her another chance, and it starts over again. James lays down the ground rules of crashing at his apartment, and the clearest one is that she absolutely cannot drink. “Baby, I don’t drink no more,” she assures him – though she immediately modifies it to “I don’t drink like I used to” – but when he leaves for work, barely a second passes before she’s rooting through his drawers and pockets for booze cash, and she can’t even make it out the door of the corner store before she tips the bottle back.
So it goes. Ryan Binaco’s screenplay is full of tiny, keenly observed touches, but its greatest virtue is its attitude towards her addictions, the way it occupies her space with her, looking on passively but not judgmentally. It’s a movie that understands the desperation of alcoholism, that knows what it is to dig through couch cushions for drinking money, while also not giving its subject a free pass; addicts not only can be, but often must be, master manipulators, and as Leslie surfs from one burned bridge to another, we piece together the full scope of who she is and what led her here.
Riseborough is on fire, as always; she nails the wild mood swings, the spaciness, the sadness of this character, while also pinpointing the most necessary element of the great movie drunk performances – that it’s not about “acting drunk,” it’s about trying and failing to act sober. It’s a role full of opportunities to chew scenery and crumble melodramatically, but she never sounds a false note; watch the way she says “It’s fine” to a potential beau at a key moment, and how you immediately understand it to be a thing she’s probably said countless times, and never really meant. Not long before that, Morris gives us a long, unbroken scene of her just sitting at a bar and listening to a sad country song, and you can’t take your eyes off her. There are not many actors who can hold your attention, much less interest, doing that.
The roles around her are cast with equal care. Teague is quietly, modestly good as her removed son, never telling us what he’s been through, and never having to. Allison Janney and Stephen Root are entirely convincing as the next stop on her non-rehab tour, a biker couple from her partying days, and it’s astonishing how quickly all three of them convey a long, complex, difficult history. Marc Maron and Andre Royo turn up later as Sweeney and Royal, co-proprietors of a roadside motel, and Maron is particularly good as a good guy who wants to help and cannot let her be, even though he probably should (and regrets it almost immediately).
By that point, our emotions about Leslie are complicated – she needs help, but you also know how it’s going to go. Morris, Binaco, and Riseborough deserve credit for leaning in to that, rather than softening her for the occasion; the picture is so grim, so relentless, and so unforgiving that you begin to realize this won’t be a conventional redemption narrative, that there may not be some magic point where someone gets to her and it all turns around (“You ain’t gonna change her,” Janney all but gloats to Sweeney). It’s hard to watch her fucking up, over and over, and then it’s hard to watch her succeed, knowing it can’t possibly last.
For that reason, “To Leslie” is not the conventional addiction narrative it seems to be. Sweeney is not a savior, nor a life-changer, and grossly insensitive at a particularly difficult moment – and even when they tee up the expected happy ending, the film goes on for another, crucial, unpredictable beat. I leaned forward at that moment, suddenly aware of how urgently I was watching what Leslie was doing, and what she would do next. And that is what a good character drama is all about. [A]
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