To Leslie
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