The meat of this melancholy, live-action country ballad is left up to the imagination, somewhere in the missing years between the title credits and the point at which Michael Morris’s feature debut actually starts. It’s probably just as well, since To Leslie is a hard enough watch as it is, not because it’s significantly depressing (redemption is suggested in myriad moments in its two-hour running time) but because it’s a testament to Andrea Riseborough’s never less than committed performance that it’s hard to see such a sad and vulnerable woman snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every turn. There are no indications on screen, but anecdotal reports that screenwriter Ryan Binaco based the script on his own mother seem pretty credible.
The credits are a mini-movie in themselves, to the sound of Here I Am by Dolly Parton (SXSW’s patron saint this year) we see a montage of family snaps that seem to tell the unspoken story of a once-happy family ripped apart by domestic abuse. There follows a grainy TV news clip in which our heroine, Leslie (Riseborough), celebrates winning $190k on a local lottery. What will she do with it? “I dunno, maybe buy a house, buy somethin’ nice for my boy, just have a better life.” A sudden cut to a squalid motel room and a title card reading “Six years later” suggests that none of that happened.
After being turfed out, Leslie’s first port of call is her teenage son James (Owen Teague), and her treatment of him is heartbreaking, stealing money from his housemate and spending it on booze, despite promising him she’ll say sober. James makes a call to his grandmother, a matriarchal, religious woman whose presence we feel but never see, and soon Leslie is on a bus back to her West Texan birthplace, where she stays with her “hilljack” relatives Dutch (Stephen Root) and Nancy (Allison Janney). That goes to hell too, and after another drunken night out she wakes up outside a motel, where the owner, Sweeney (Marc Maron), finds her in a shambolic state and shoos her away. In his office, Sweeney’s eccentric business partner Royal (Andre Royo) fills him in on Leslie’s sad story, and in a fit of compassion he offers her a job, as the motel’s cleaner.
For the first hour, To Leslie is a discomfiting experience, as Leslie falls further with every helping hand, and by the time she meets Sweeney it’s possible that she may screw up this opportunity too. In fact, she does, several times, until finally Leslie has a late-night epiphany courtesy of Willie Nelson. But can she stick to her guns? This is the power of Riseborough’s work: she inhabits Leslie without an ounce of vanity, and as deserving as Leslie is of our pity, Riseborough makes sure she works for it. Drunk acting is hard to nail, but Riseborough does it (“She looks like she was rode hard and hung up wet,” quotes Nancy)—you can almost smell the booze as she flirts grotesquely in a cowboy bar and spits nails when her drunken advances are spurned. The locals play a part in this; whenever Leslie shows her face in public, the stories of her lost wealth follow her everywhere, even though, as Leslie bitterly muses, $190k isn’t that much.
It’s hard to know quite who the audience for Morris’s film is, since it occupies a space usually taken by hybrid fiction films such as The Florida Project or especially Bloody Noses, Empty Pockets, which could almost be a sister piece. But it certainly paints a portrait; Morris’s use of country music is a little on the nose sometimes, but then again, country music itself is always on the nose—it’s hardly something to look to for nuance. Cinematographer Larkin Seiple very much helps here too; he shoots Leslie’s night-owl excursions with subtle and sympathy: in the neon womb of a bar, Leslie can feel safe—it’s the male predators that she has to be wary of, as we see with depressing regularity.
Playing the lone kind male in Leslie’s life, Maron has his work cut out, but he’s a warm, touching presence, and he sells what might otherwise have been a completely one-dimensional character. He also makes sure this isn’t a one-woman show—which, given what he was up against, is no mean feat—and reinforces the film’s message: as Willie Nelson once said, “When you put your life in a good place, good things follow.”
