Review: “To Leslie” – Andrea Riseborough Is A Revelation

Leslie “Lee” Rowlands (Andrea Riseborough) has struck out for the last time. She hasn’t paid her rent, preferring to spend her money to fuel a drink habit. Now she’s homeless. Her life’s belongings strewn out in the street. The lottery winner who carelessly blew her $190,000 prize years ago, picks up a pink suitcase containing the only belongings she’s interested in, leaving the rest in the car park of a residential motel. Then she makes an unanticipated trip to another town hoping her estranged 20-year-old son, James (Owen Teague), will give her a place to stay.

James, it turns out, has seemingly survived the disorder of his mother’s prolonged hardship and is both well-adjusted and amenable to her plea. He gives her his bed in an apartment he shares with a friend, and sleeps on the couch. But, knowing her alcoholism, he says she cannot drink. It’s his only rule if she’s to stay with him. She almost instantly breaks it, and steals money to do so.

James calls on the help of Nancy (Allison Janney) and Dutch (Stephen Root) for help, former friends who helped raise Leslie’s son as a teenager after she abruptly left him without care. They hold contempt for the woman who abandoned her child but agree to take her him. But like before, Leslie can’t help but turn to the booze. She’s spotted drunk at a bar by one of Nancy’s pals and she’s locked out of their home as a result.

Andrea Riseborough stars as Leslie “Lee” Rowlands in To Leslie (2022) | Momentum Pictures

Pink suitcase in tow, Leslie is on the street again. She sleeps outside a motel and is initially shooed off the property by nice guy Sweeney (Marc Maron) before he is stung with guilt and reaches out to her, offering a job and a place to live. Will this be the opportunity for her to turn her life around, or is it already too late?

As a bleak reflection of the impact of addiction, To Leslie is adept at revealing the runaway train ploughing through relationships and leaving bloodied, battered wreckage in its wake. The early part of the film exposes those wounds. Not just in its protagonist but more importantly in those who felt the brunt without the nullifying shield of booze and drugs.

Leslie’s combative relationship with Nancy is the most potent. Her old friend, played by Allison Janney sporting a weathered, steely defiance and long, salt and pepper hair, harbours a sense of culpability in allowing, and perhaps abetting, this troubled woman’s downfall. But it is countered by atonement in taking in her son. Nancy is convinced she has paid her dues.

For Leslie, still struggling with alcoholism and depression, it’s hard for her to differentiate between benevolence and exploitation. Whether it’s Nancy’s actions in the present or the past, or her new friend Sweeney’s attempts to get her back on her feet. It’s a persuasive reminder of alcohol addiction’s impact on those affected, the way it weakens sensitivity and awareness. Moments of empty, nihilistic pleasure augmenting the turmoil.

Riseborough is magnetic in her depiction of a woman who has completely lost her way. After years of self-harm, she sports chronic persecution across a face that’s sometimes bruised and always exasperated and bloody-eyed. She can be mean and sharp-tongued at times, and she can be quiet, sorrowful and insular at others. Despite the perpetual fatigue making even the blinking of an eye appear burdensome, she possesses admirable fortitude. It’s perhaps only conceivable from years defined by self-inflicted setbacks that have forced her, time and time again, to pick herself up from the gutter.

Given the acute chaos of its alcoholic protagonist, To Leslie might be too well-rounded thematically, too finely-tuned in tying up loose ends, to fully complement the instinctiveness of Andrea Riseborough’s performance. But the English actor’s riveting turn is such a revelation, her palpable hurt so provocative, we’re thankful for a sense of structure and calm, no matter how manufactured.