Andrea Riseborough as a recovering alcoholic is the best thing about To Leslie, says Julia Hamilton.
In her latest film, To Leslie, Andrea Riseborough plays a small-town, West Texas single mother, a complete basket case of a rock-bottom drunk who’s made such a mess of her life that she is bankrupt on all fronts: physically, spiritually, mentally. The opening credits play over a tellingly smudged montage of snapshots of Leslie from better days, culminating in a TV clip of her winning the lottery in her local town, six years before, hollering with drunken joy at her incredible luck. Tellingly, her 13-year-old son skulks at the edges of the crowd of people surrounding her, looking embarrassed, as if he can already see the future.
Fast-forward six years to the film proper where an older, scrawnier, more dishevelled version of Leslie is finally being kicked out of the depressing motel where she’s been living because none of the other residents will lend her any more money. She really is skating on the edge of oblivion. The awfulness of this moment can hardly be underestimated, given what we already know of Leslie’s life. She has squandered all the money and a good deal else, too, as alcoholics do.
Homeless, she takes a bus to a nameless town to stay with her doleful, long-suffering son, James (Owen Teague), now 19, who generously – or naively – gives her his bedroom in the apartment he shares with a fellow construction worker. His only ground rule is no drinking, which Leslie blithely agrees to without the slightest intention of sticking to it. The next day, as soon as James is gone, we see her rifling through drawers, trouser pockets and the back of the sofa for money to go drinking. When James inevitably realises Ma is drunk – again – he calls the police and has her chucked out.
As a result, Leslie crawls back to where it all started, her hometown, lodging for a night or two with old “friends”, Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root) who soon boot her out because of her drinking, although, ironically, they were happy enough to drink with and enable her when she had money.
Now what? We see Leslie hanging around in a bar acting the part of sexy vamp in a tragic attempt to cadge drinks from the local talent. But she’s too far gone, too much of a nutcase even for the sleepily tolerant cowboys propping up the bar, and she flounces out.
She sleeps rough in a ruined outbuilding belonging to a local motel where the manager, Sweeney (Marc Maron), somewhat improbably takes a fancy to her and gives her a job. She continues to drink for a little while longer until she has one of those moments of truth when she truly sees what she’s become. We watch her working through a painful withdrawal from booze with the aid of the good-natured, decent Sweeney and beginning her journey to a sober life.
Riseborough’s portrayal of Leslie is extremely accomplished. Kate Winslet described it as “the greatest female performance on screen I have ever seen in my life” and the entire Hollywood A-list seems to have been rooting for her, hence the contentious Oscar nomination for best actress which has put various noses out of joint, with fans complaining that Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till) were snubbed in the nominations as a result.
I have reservations about this film for different reasons. The timing feels off: the long drunkalogues of the early part go on too long. Yes, it’s important to show the full spectrum of the awfulness of alcoholism but there is a limit to how many times you can watch an alcoholic go through the whole ghastly cycle of spree followed by remorse, engendered by the predictably awful behaviour.
What bothered me most about this film, however, as a recovering alcoholic myself, was how Leslie gets better, just like that. Given that the film is set in Texas, I kept waiting for her to go to AA. But no. She does it herself, propped up by Sweeney’s seemingly unending tolerance of her awful withdrawals and her utter uselessness as an employee. The word recovery isn’t mentioned once.
The viewer watches as Leslie stays sober through a series of humiliating setbacks, as well as beginning an affair with Sweeney: emotional swings and roundabouts almost guaranteed to make her relapse. Somehow she continues to walk on water with no network of other alcoholics to support her or any contact with what AA insists on calling a “higher power”. Given her state of dereliction at the beginning of the film, my willing suspension of disbelief took a pasting. The sugary ending feels like it belongs in a different film.
Riseborough gives a terrific performance as an active alcoholic – no easy feat – but it seems improbable she would be kept sober by the love of a good man. Is this – find a long-suffering fellow and get better – really the film’s message?
To Leslie is available to watch on streaming services.
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