To Leslie

Leslie is a party girl and single mom who once won the lottery, but that was years ago, and now she’s just a broke and trashy drunk living in West Texas, struggling to get her life back together and repair the bridges she burned down long ago.

To Leslie was ignored in theatres, and would’ve just faded quietly away, doomed to linger in the back end of “drama” options on one streaming service or another until someone mercifully wiped the server, if not for a surprise Best Actress nomination for Andrea Riseborough (Oblivion, 2013) at the 2023 Oscars.

Spoiler: She lost to Michelle Yoeh for Everything Everywhere All At Once.

It was such a surprising nomination, that public backlash prompted an Academy investigation into whether or not an aggressive word-of-mouth campaign, waged for Riseborough’s nomination by some of more her high-profile Hollywood peers, had violated any rules in their effort to secure her the nod.

Spoiler: The investigation went nowhere, because the last thing Hollywood would ever want to do is to imply that nepotism of any kind is a bad thing…

To Leslie is the story of a single mom, hailing from a dirt patch bit of nowhere somewhere out in West Texas, who won $190,000 in the lottery, and then proceeded to drink it all away. Seven years later, Leslie is a trashy alcoholic loser a step away from oblivion—Not to be confused with the movie Oblivion, which she also starred in—and the film then tells the story of Leslie as she tries to rebuild her life.

Spoiler: It is exactly like what you think it’s going to be like.

Now, your mileage may vary as to whether or not the nomination was “deserved” but at the very least I will say this, Riseborough's performance is better than anything else in this film. She really is good, even if everything else about the film has a John Lovitz “ACTING!” feel to it.

The problem here is that To Leslie is dumb. It’s an obvious and predictably shallow little “heartwarming” film. It tries really hard to disguise this at times, and act like it’s one of the deepest, most dramatic, and emotionally devastating films of all time, but it always lacks an edge, often visibly chickening out when faced with the possibility of going someplace that might actually be mean, or ugly, or hard, opting to instead fuzz out the implications, or to just skip quickly past the bloody parts, making the whole thing more like a Hallmark movie with delusions of grandeur than any kind of sincere and truthful drama about humanity and its failings and struggles.

I don’t want to sound too mean, because I believe the efforts here are sincere, but that’s the film’s entire problem…

A bunch of privileged people deliberately set out to create a film about pain and poverty and loss and the struggle to rebuild yourself after you have been broken, and they very obviously have never had any experience in the things that they depict the characters facing, certainly not in the places they depict them experiencing it. It’s like they were inspired by a hard luck magazine article one Sunday at a leisurely brunch, or maybe they just watched some better movies, and wanted to be recognized as an artist so badly they decided to mimic these better movies, and it’s all made worse by the fact that they obviously have no idea how transparent and deliberate these efforts are. I’m not saying you can only “write what you know,” you can totally make things up, but also, sometimes… you have to know something about it, at least a little bit.

To Leslie reminded me of the film Billy Boy (previously called Juvenile) that I saw at Fantastic Fest in 2017, I think. The film starred, and was written by, Blake Jenner, who was apparently on Glee, and it was awful. Awful. False. Shallow. Dumb. Transparently performative. The worst kind of naked grab for “indie cred,” like we were watching the kind of acting class improv they make fun of on Barry. Then, during the Q&A—all while dressed like a parody of Derek Zoolander in casual wear—Blake, all too-cool-for-school model guy while slouched in his chair, openly admitted the film wasn’t based on any of his experiences at all, not even any firsthand experience he heard about from the people it happened to, he just watched Mean Streets and was like “I can do that,” so he wrote the cliche-laden, half-baked script, and then crowdfunded it off the backs of the Glee fan base.

The sheer audacity and lack of self-awareness was stupefying to witness.

That’s what To Leslie felt like to me, like Hillbilly Elegy meets a college student’s one-man-show done “in the style of” the Plays of Tennessee Williams, but instead of a Southern Gothic melodrama, it’s set in the Texas Scrubland.

There was one good part: At maybe her lowest point, Leslie finds herself sitting, slumped and blank-faced, drunk at a bar, while Willie Nelson’s “Are You Sure” plays in the background, his voice heavy with actual lived experience: “Look around you, look down the bar from you, at the faces that you see. Are you sure this is where you want to be?” As the song plays, the moment drags out, the camera only focusing on Leslie, alone at the bar as the other patrons and the bartenders move through their own nights around her, murmuring, glasses clinking, and it only becomes more and more clear that Willie is singing directly to her, and Leslie finally snorts and shakes her head, and speaking to no one in particular, but more the whole world, says in resigned disbelief, slurring: “Are you fucking kidding me with this song...”

A single moment of brilliance in an otherwise dull affair.

In the end, To Leslie is too rote, too by the numbers, too deliberate in its intent, nothing but a poverty tour held at arm’s length, like slowly driving past a homeless encampment in a limousine while gawking, all ramshackle off-Broadway agonizing, and not anywhere near enough earned catharsis, especially once the "Ten Months Later" ellipse hits right before the denouement.

I will say this… the nomination at least felt partially deserved to me, because To Leslie is generally pretty typical of some of the more trite and bombastic Oscar bait garbage you usually see on the list each year.

Thumbs down.