To Leslie Movie Review: A performance backed redemption story

Andrea Riseborough in a still from To Leslie

Film: To Leslie
Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Andre Royo, Owen Teague, Stephen Root, James Landry Hébert, Matt Lauria, Catfish Jean, Marc Maron
Director: Michael Morris
Rating: 3.5/5

'To Leslie' gained ascendance at the Oscars because of Andrea Riseborough's inimitable performance and deservingly so. The film is a stirring character study captured intimately in 35mm. We first meet Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in an opening credits montage playing to a Dolly Parton track, showing Leslie winning $190,000 in a lottery, celebrating the victory, and then going all the way to rock bottom from there. Seven years after the win, in dire straits because of her alcoholism, she gets kicked out of her rental home and decides to drop in on her now-19-year-old son James (Owen Teague) at his apartment in the city. James, whom she abandoned when he was 15, reaches the end of his tether when Leslie continues to feed her destructive habits at his expense. Leslie has no alternative but to find her way back to her rural hometown, the place where she is thought of as, in her words, 'a piece of shit.'

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Screenwriter Ryan Binaco and director Michael Morris treat this story from a psychological perspective - detailing her pathways to self-destruction. And it's not an easy watch for the first 40 minutes or so. We see Leslie swim in a sea of darkness and it's of her own making as she piles on a network of bad relationships along the way. Things do get better for Leslie. She finds refuge in a little old motel run by a benevolent man, Sweeney (Marc Maron), and his goofy partner Royal (Andre Royo)…and we see a faint glimmer of hope in that. But does Leslie see it, too? It's never easy for an alcoholic to come back from the brink. The DP Larkin Seiple captures each moment with great sensitivity and the editing by Chris McCaleb is also quite uncompromising.

In a brilliant scene set in a bar, we see Leslie listening to a Willie Nelson song "Are You Sure" whose lyrics hit close to her life story. As the camera inches closer to her face we see a well-spring of emotion flitting through - regrets, guilt, defeat, recriminations, justifications… it's all so vividly etched on her expressive face. Since the entire film is centered around Leslie, it's Riseborough who grips us throughout with her tour-de-force performance. Morris uses simple shots and economical takes to make us focus our attention on what's happening inside Leslie. Riseborough's performance anchors the film, making the audience feel the utter depravity of her existence. In fact, it's shocking to see Riseborough as Leslie, her commitment to the part of a woman morphing into honkytonk trash is certainly up there with the best.

The soundtrack of the film makes the best use of tracks by George Jones, Waylon Jennings, and Patty Griffin, to give us a serenade of Leslie's depraved experiences.

Andrea Riseborough's controversial nomination for the Oscars was for this very performance that was publicly praised by Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchet on separate occasions. Her lived-in performance is a note-perfect one and deserved to be in the elite list of nominations.