So then the dark horse of the Best Actress Oscar race and the film that launched it’s very own interior investigation is finally ticked off my watchlist after only being on it for a few days. The rest of these catch up movies I have been waiting to watch for months in some cases and yet I’d never heard of To Leslie, I feel like many people, until it unbeknownst to us was to become surprisingly one of the more controversial selections in this years nominations field. Especially shocking after one watches the film and goes; “Yeah I guess that was pretty good. Yeah I get it, Riseborough is good as always”. To Leslie is more than just it’s lead performance, but not an awful lot more to be honest.

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To Leslie is your typical character study of a person at rock bottom and the characters and situations that they end up in along the way of them trying, failing and trying again to make a better life for themselves. In regards to this formula, no, the film does not do much different or new. As with all of these films that rise above any sort of level they are bolstered by great performances and in this case To Leslie is of course very much the same, Andrea Riseborough as the titular Leslie is really great, despite in complete honesty a slight worry after not knowing much about the film when our first couple of scenes consisted of her screaming and swearing at the top of her lungs in a southern accent. At the start it did worry me and did feel a little like the way the Best Acting nominations sometimes go to those performances doing shall we say “the most acting”, and by that I mean the most screaming. The joy of the film and what makes it more than a slight effort is that the character and the film do have depth and time and time again along Leslie’s journey we find her in different circumstances and all manner of different emotionality’s. Riseborough is as great as everybody is saying, but is also not really the sort of performance that will stick in my mind the way that it has been built up to. Now of course that is because due to the press around it, the performance has taken on a whole unfair and insurmountable mythos about it, but still the performance was a sublime one, even with it being something I’ve seen many times over. Beyond Riseborough the film does have a lot of other great supporting turns. Marc Maron, Allison Janey and Stephen Root all give quieter performances that allow Leslie to bounce off and are all three doing great subtle work. Owen Teague as Leslie’s son also does great work but is sometimes in the early scenes I found hamstringed by the weaker dialogue of Ryan Binaco’s overall solid screenplay. Michael Morris as a director is also not doing much creatively beyond capturing these performances with grit and a nice truth and sense of place, but this film is not calling for such visual gymnastics or direction as “showy” as its lead performance is in certain ways. A soft and average recommend. Not awful by any stretch of the imagination, but more likely a trivia question for future movie trivia nights than anything else. A little cruel to say, but most likely a truth.

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A very solid 6/10 whose lead performance is as good as it has been heralded to be, however this is no major effort beyond that. The rest of the ensemble are also great, but the film’s overall character study narrative is a little trite and cliché, even if it offers the basis for again a great performance by Riseborough. Morris as a directorial debut has made a real solid film here, but that’s about it, I’m afraid to report.

P.S. If you want an opinion on the choice of whether or not her nomination should have been rescinded, then I don’t even know what to say… it was a performance in a film, the performance was great, the film was solid. Why should or could it ever not be valid?

-        -  Thomas Carruthers