Monthly Archives: March 2023

  • To Leslie

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Morris (2022)

    Six years ago, single mother Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) won $190,000 in a lottery and became a celebrity in her West Texan home town.  She told a local TV news reporter she’d use the money to make a better life for her thirteen-year-old son, James (Drew Youngblood).  After squandering her winnings on booze and drugs, she’s now destitute and estranged from James.  Leslie lives mostly on the streets although Michael Morris’s low-budget indie drama starts – after a flashback to the television coverage of her lottery win – with Leslie being chucked out of a cheap motel and bawling expletives at the chucker-out (Pramode Kumar).  She makes contact with her son (now played by Owen Teague), a construction worker, who shares an apartment with Darren (Catfish Jean).  James lets Leslie move in with them on condition that she stays off alcohol:  he soon finds empty liquor bottles under his mother’s bed.  Before telling her to leave, James phones her ex-friend, Nancy (Allison Janney), who reluctantly agrees to put Leslie up.  Her stay with Nancy and her partner, Dutch (Stephen Root), is also short-lived – for the same reason – and Leslie is soon at another motel, this time sleeping outside the place.  Sweeney (Marc Macron), who jointly owns and runs the motel with Royal (Andre Royo), warns her off but Leslie inadvertently leaves her suitcase behind.  After fending off the sexual advances of Pete (James Landry Hebert), an old flame of Leslie’s and a friend of Nancy and Dutch, Leslie returns to the motel, asking about the suitcase.  Kind-hearted Sweeney takes pity on her and, on the spur of the moment, offers Leslie a cleaning job, in exchange for a room at the motel and a modest wage.  His impulsive benevolence is To Leslie’s pivotal moment.  It’s hardly plain sailing for the title character from this point on but things start to look up for her.

    This is a formula screenplay:  thanks to an act of human kindness, a hopeless loser gets another chance.  Even within those limits, Ryan Binaco’s writing is clumsy, especially when it comes to making important things happen.  Alone in a bar at closing time, Leslie decides to visit the home where she raised James and to get back on the wagon.  As she dries out, she develops a tentative friendship with Sweeney, who invites her along to a local fair.  When they arrive at the gathering she seems determined to ignore taunts from Pete but the script is more determined that Leslie will lose it, though she’s still abstaining at this point, and have public shouting matches with Pete and with Nancy, who berates her for abandoning James when he was still a child.  Sweeney’s insistence on showing Leslie a video recording of that news report of her lottery win is incredibly insensitive (for an otherwise convincingly sensitive man):  it’s purely a device for her to quit the motel job and go AWOL, with Sweeney trying desperately to find her.  When she eventually returns, Leslie tells Sweeney she wants to renovate the dilapidated ice-cream store across the street from the motel.  Ten months later, that’s what she’s done, with Sweeney and Royal’s help, and turned the place into a diner.  On the day it opens, no one comes until Nancy appears, well into the evening.  When Leslie accuses her of telling potential customers to stay away, Nancy apologises that she hasn’t ‘been there’ for Leslie at tough times in her life.   This is the starter reconciliation.  For the main course, Nancy hands over to James.  As Sweeney and Royal go to work in the kitchen, Leslie and her son embrace.

    There’s a mismatch between these clichéd contrivances and the film’s graphic descriptions of the protagonist’s alcoholism and anti-social behaviour.  The latter are sometimes so powerfully credible that it’s a real relief to see Leslie escape the vicious circle and achieve redemption – even though you don’t believe in either of those things.  To Leslie is the belated first cinema feature of Michael Morris, well-known and highly experienced in British theatre (director of the Old Vic from 1999 to 2002) and television.  The film was shot in Los Angeles, over nineteen days during the Covid pandemic, but Morris and his cinematographer, Larkin Seiple (DP on a real odd couple of 2022 pictures:  the other is Everything Everywhere All at Once), give the story a plausible small-town texture.  The streets, bars and motels are unprepossessing without being too emphatically grotty.  The music playing on radios and jukeboxes rings true.  It’s one of the better features of the screenplay that it shows Christianity, or at least the profession of Christianity, as also essential to the place (we gather that Leslie’s mother (Lauren Letherer) is particularly pious and Nancy claims to be) – so that Leslie’s own irreligion reinforces her pariah status.

    To Leslie is well cast and acted.  Assuming that Allison Janney can nowadays pick and choose her supporting roles, it’s interesting to see her take on the far from likeable Nancy.  Owen Teague, with a look of the young Tommy Lee Jones, is excellent as James.  Andrea Riseborough (of whom much more below) is outstanding.  Naturally pale and skinny, she has a head start playing a wraith but Riseborough has never looked so startlingly ill on screen.  This is a portrait of an alcoholic that’s highly dynamic without feeling theatrical.  Riseborough is fearlessly into the role:  she sometimes moves her mouth in an extraordinary way – almost gurning – that really seems part of Leslie’s pathological condition.  Her lank hair doesn’t look like a creation of the make-up team.  You believe this woman smells really bad.  And Leslie can be funny, as well as horrifying.  Morris directs Riseborough skilfully, observing rather than showcasing her performance.

    Absorbing but no great shakes as a film, To Leslie has earned itself at least a footnote in the history of the Academy Awards.  When this year’s Oscar nominations were announced on 24th January, there was widespread surprise that the Best Actress fivesome included Andrea Riseborough.  Over the next few days, a crescendo of media disapproval at the tactics used to promote her work in To Leslie led to the Academy’s announcing an immediate ‘review of the campaign procedures around this year’s nominees, to ensure that no guidelines were violated’ – and speculation that Riseborough’s nomination might be rescinded.  In the event, it was allowed to stand but the Academy pledged to address, for the longer term, ‘social media and outreach campaigning tactics’ which in this case were acknowledged to have caused ‘concern’.

    The Riseborough campaign depended on pass-it-on propulsion rather than time-honoured for-your-consideration advertising in movie trade papers and elsewhere.  Word of mouth campaigning doesn’t sound unreasonable for a small-scale picture lacking studio heft.  After To Leslie premiered at the South by Southwest festival(s) in March 2022, Momentum Pictures picked up the distribution rights and gave the film a simultaneous theatrical and on-demand streaming release in early October.  The theatrical release was limited and the box-office receipts were negligible so it’s no surprise that Momentum (a name that’s ironic in light of subsequent events) chose not to promote To Leslie further.  Michael Morris and his wife, the actress Mary McCormack, went for DIY momentum instead:  they invited their industry contacts to view the film and, if they liked it, to invite their contacts to do the same.  When voting for the Oscar nominations got underway, Riseborough was endorsed by the likes of Amy Adams, Jennifer Aniston, Helen Hunt, Edward Norton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlize Theron and Kate Winslet – as well as by Cate Blanchett, the front-runner in this year’s Best Actress race.

    The Morris-McCormack campaign brings to mind the one mounted by Julia Roberts for Javier Bardem’s performance in Biutiful (2010), a film that relatively few Academy voters had seen.  Roberts’s cheerleading, which surely helped secure a nomination for Bardem (just three years after he’d won an Oscar), caused no concern at all.  Twelve years later, the very different reaction to the push for Riseborough (who’d not previously been Oscar-nominated) derives in large part from another Academy Awards-centred social media initiative:  #OscarSoWhite, launched in 2015 in response to all twenty acting nominations that year going to white players.  The same thing happened in 2016 but hasn’t happened since and the political traction of #OscarSoWhite has continued to increase.  In 2021, nine of the twenty nominees were non-white and two of them won but there were still complaints that Anthony Hopkins was voted Best Actor in preference to the late Chadwick Boseman.  Last year, there were only four non-white acting nominees though (as I recall) not much fuss about the decline in numbers.  Again, two of the four eventual winners were non-white; on this occasion, they included the Best Actor but Will Smith, by the time his name was called, had already ensured different headlines for the 2022 Oscars show.

    This year, seven of the twenty acting nominees are non-white (I’m not counting Ana de Armas, nominated for Blonde, who I understand to be white Cuban) but they don’t include Danielle Deadwyler, hotly tipped for a nod for Till.  Much of the animus towards the Andrea Riseborough campaign is expressed in claims that she elbowed out Deadwyler – and perhaps Viola Davis, for The Woman King.  Riseborough can hardly be responsible for two people missing out yet complaints about how she landed the nomination tend to imply otherwise, the received wisdom being that sixth and seventh places in the nominations ballot were both filled by Black actresses.  Some of the OTT endorsements from big-name Riseborough fans are as bizarre as the grumbles about her:  describing Riseborough’s work in To Leslie as ‘the greatest female performance on screen I have ever seen in my life’, Kate Winslet, despite her hyperbole, manages to suggest she’s seen male actors do better.

    Cards on the table:  I’ve so far seen three of the other performances nominated for Best Actress (to be more precise, two-and-a-half, since I gave up on Everything Everywhere All at Once).  If I had an Oscar vote, it would go to Andrea Riseborough rather than Cate Blanchett, Michelle Williams or Michelle Yeoh.  I think Riseborough’s acting in To Leslie is far superior to Danielle Deadwyler’s in Till.  (I’ve not seen Blonde or, for that matter, The Woman King.)  But that’s almost beside the point.  I’ve written at length here about the Riseborough campaign hoo-hah partly because I’m an Academy Awards anorak but partly because I’m troubled by the implications of the controversy and of #OscarSoWhite thinking more generally.  Armond White is spot on when he writes that ‘The media’s idea that black performers are entitled to awards is an insane reaction to historical prejudice’.  As someone who attaches too much importance to the Oscars, even I can see there’s an obscene disjunction between the scale of racial prejudice, past and present, and the idea that movie prizes can serve to atone.

    17 February 2023

  • Blue Jean

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Georgia Oakley (2022)

    North-East England, 1988.  As twenty-something Jean (Rosy McEwen) drives to the secondary school where she’s a PE and games teacher, the BBC Today programme news story on her car radio is the Thatcher government’s upcoming ‘Section 28’ legislation to prohibit the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.  Jean turns off the radio but can’t do much about a Tory poster on the billboard she drives past each working day – a poster urging ‘traditional values’ and ‘keep politics out of education’ (which brings pots and kettles to mind).  Before she goes out on a Saturday evening, Jean watches Blind Date – reviled as anti-gay propaganda by Viv (Kerrie Hayes), Jean’s lover.  The two spend the rest of the evening at their usual bar with friends Ace (Stacy Abalogun) and Debbie (Amy Booth-Steel), who, like Viv, are forthrightly lesbian.  Jean gets on well with them but seems at a remove from the group, in how she looks and what she says.  At school, she keeps her sexual orientation a secret, her private life just that.  As she walks through the changing rooms after a games lesson, a couple of undressed girls giggle, ‘Hey, get lost, dyke’, but without seeming to mean it.  When other teachers invite Jean out for a Friday night drink, she always makes her excuses.  The school is some way from her home and social network.  Jean doesn’t mind the lengthy commute:  it’s reassuring proof of the distance between her two worlds.

    It’s no surprise that the storyline of Blue Jean turns the title character’s carefully compartmentalised life upside down.  Her partnership with Viv founders, thanks to Jean’s in-and-out-of-the-closet tendencies and to how, in particular, these play out in relation to a new pupil at Jean’s school.  But this predictability doesn’t stop writer-director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature from being a good film, with two major strengths.  The first is Rosy McEwen who, from the start, embodies Jean’s vigilant unease subtly but incisively.  Although she deals in a teacher’s usual way with pupils whispering in class, McEwen shows in her face, in a split second, Jean’s nervousness that they may be whispering about her.  Blue Jean’s other chief virtue is that Georgia Oakley, while making clear the corrosive consequences of Jean’s failure to embrace her sexuality, nevertheless takes her anxieties seriously.  As the title implies, Jean’s blue because she’s living a lie but the narrative does justice to the challenge of her telling the truth.  Born in the year in which her story is set, Oakley is generous and imaginative enough to show sympathy for the protagonist’s predicament beyond simply making the point that Clause 28 encouraged people like Jean to deny their sexual identity.  And Oakley recreates this bygone age with some nice period details.  Jean makes a living in physical education but she’s a heavy smoker.  At home she plays a tape that teaches its listeners to relax – to highly counterproductive effect when the tape gets snarled up in Jean’s cassette player.

    The new pupil and plot catalyst is sixteen-year-old Lois (Lucy Halliday), a Scottish girl who lives on the wrong side of the tracks.  One Saturday night, she turns up at the bar frequented by Jean, Viv et al.  Jean and Lois exchange looks but no words about this, either in the bar or at school next week.  Lois joins the netball team that Jean coaches, where her aptitude and attitude instantly put her at loggerheads with Siobhan (Lydia Page), hitherto the team’s star player.  When Lois next comes to the gay bar, there is a confrontation with Jean, who anxiously warns her off.  The confrontation takes place in the bar toilets:  Viv sees Jean and Lois emerging from them and draws the wrong conclusion.  Jean explains who Lois; Viv is furiously unimpressed by Jean’s fearful reaction to being spotted in queer company.  At school, rising tensions between Siobhan and Lois culminate in a post-netball-practice fight, which Jean breaks up, followed by an incident in the showers, part of which Jean happens to witness.  Siobhan provokes the fight by taunting Lois as a virgin and a lesbian.  In the showers, she seduces Lois and they’re kissing hungrily when Jean walks past.  At this point, Siobhan breaks away, screaming claims that Lois has assaulted her.  The girls are called in by Paula (Lainey Shaw), Jean’s immediate boss and prejudiced in Siobhan’s favour, to give their accounts of what happened.  Jean doesn’t contradict Siobhan’s version of events and Lois is suspended from school.

    Georgia Oakley validates what seem like plotting contrivances by rooting them in character or returning to them fruitfully.  Jean makes a mess of things vis-à-vis Lois at nearly every turn:  how so, when Jean is such a cautious self-protector?   Because she hasn’t factored in this kind of unexpected intervention – Lois is too young to be in the bar, which isn’t near the school.  So Jean is Jean is unprecedentedly panicked:  Section 28 headlines and undaunted Viv’s demands increase the panic.   In an early scene, Sasha (Aoife Kennan), Jean’s sister, calls unexpectedly at her flat:  Sasha’s mother-in-law has been rushed into hospital and urgently needs a babysitter for her five-year-old son, Sam.  When the doorbell rings, Jean and Viv are making love; once Sasha has gone, leaving Sam with Jean, Viv reappears and the little boy demands to know who she is; Jean’s reply – ‘my friend’ – seems reasonable but Viv leaves in a huff.  For a while, this bit seems nothing more than an awkward way of introducing the fault line in Jean’s and Viv’s relationship but its meanings are transformed by a later scene, when Jean goes for lunch at the home of Sasha and her dreary husband, Tim (Scott Turnbull).  A well-written conversation between the sisters, while Tim’s out of the room, reveals that Sam told Sasha about Viv.  And more:  Jean’s annoyed to see that the family photos on Sasha’s mantelpiece still include one of Jean’s own wedding day – she has asked Sasha before to take it down.  Sasha refuses:  she doesn’t ‘think it’s right that you want to erase part of your life – that you expect us to’.  She takes Jean to task for not telling her, before she dropped Sam off that night, that ‘you had a woman there’.

    There are some clumsy things in the film, to be sure.  The Blind Date clips make their point about hetero-normative media monopoly in the 1980s but one would have been enough:  it’s hard to believe that Jean, who has tried and abandoned straight romance, keeps watching the show, even in a spirit of masochism.  An excerpt from a BBC TV news bulletin about women ‘commandos’ abseiling into the House of Lords to protest the Clause 28 legislation is worth including but how come the (surprisingly numerous) PE teachers at Jean’s school are all gathered round a staffroom television to watch?   Oakley then makes things worse by parcelling out crudely obvious reactions to the news from the older teachers:  Paula commends the legislation (‘Young people have such vulnerable minds’); Dave (Deka Walmsley) jokes about the protesters’ appearance (‘Wouldn’t wanna run into them women in a dark alley – they’d ‘ave ya guts for garters, they would’).  At Sam’s birthday party, Jean gets trapped in a gruesome conversation with Tim’s ex-colleague, Craig (Edmund Wiseman):  when he eventually asks, ‘Got a man on the scene at the moment then have you, Jean?’ she finds herself replying, ‘No, I haven’t … I’m a lesbian’.  It’s ironically effective that she comes clean at a public gathering as a desperate means of escaping it but the follow-up sequence is one cliché after another.  Jean sits in Sasha and Tim’s garden with just her cigarette for company.  She has a laughing-crying jag then an epiphany as she sees horses in the distance, cantering free.  (This was made worse watching Blue Jean at BFI where the current Lloyds Bank commercial is always played these days between the trailers and the main film.)

    Yet more of Blue Jean works well – and Oakley brings off some difficult things, including the nice distinction between Jean’s ‘non-promotion’ and concealment of her sexuality.  The damaging consequences of her discretion, especially her failure to contradict Siobhan’s lie, register strongly but not melodramatically.  Even in the film’s relatively upbeat climax, Oakley avoids the easy option of simply dissolving Jean’s ambivalence.  Trying to make amends to Lois, Jean persuades her to come along to a birthday party for Debbie.  The party is subsidised by a ‘bog fund’:  Ace explains to Lois that ‘any poor lesbians in the North East’ can apply for support to this fund, which depends considerably on the likes of Jean – ‘lesbians with “proper” jobs’.  Viv’s at the party; she and Jean exchange friendly words but there’s no suggestion they’ll get back together.  This time, when Jean leaves the room where the party’s happening and has a solitary smoke on a balcony outside, she’s calmly reflective (and there’s not a black horse to be seen in the urban nightscape she looks out on).  Next morning, when she drives to work, the Tory poster is still in evidence but Jean arrives at school with a smile on her face.  That uncharacteristic smile is seriously premature – Clause 28 was eventually repealed in 2003 – and may even be willed.  But it’s good to see.

    10 February 2023

Posts navigation