To Leslie

dir: Michael Morris

2022

This flick is a hard watch, and not only for those who struggle with the demon drink, or those who love or have to live with people struggling with the demon drink.

The Leslie of the title is a fuck up, an alcoholic fuck up, and that’s okay. Lots of us are fuck ups. Lots of us are alcoholics. Some of us are alcoholic fuck ups. Some of us are fuck ups independent of the fact that we’re alcoholics. There are many permutations out there. For every person you might know whose work environment and status protects them from the repercussions of their drinking, you probably know of many more people who lose jobs, families and housing over it. At some time.

And some of them came good, so to speak, cleaned up their act, gave it up completely and filled the hole in their hearts with something else, or someone else. And they did okay.

And others didn’t come good, got worse and either died or stayed worse on a plateau that never gets easier to watch.

It’s depressing to watch, and I imagine even more depressing to live through. The conceit of this flick is that Leslie may or may not have been a fuck up before, but one fateful day when she won a lottery and thought she was set for life, for her and her kid, she thought $190,000 would insulate her from the chaos of life.

Instead she spent it all on booze and drugs, and lost everything, including abandoning her kid.

When we meet Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in the present, she’s getting kicked out of a scuzzy skid row motel, trying to give the kinds of excuses you’re pretty sure she’s tried hundreds of times before.

A reoccurring image throughout the flick is of Leslie consulting this folded up, yellowed piece of paper, upon which she has bunches of phone numbers written down but also with lines drawn through most of them. It’s short hand for “Leslie has burned almost everyone she’s ever known, and there are barely any people left who will even take her call, let alone let her crash at their place.” There's precious few names left.

It’s a profoundly sorry state to be in. To spend the first part of your life with family and friends, being loved and loving, building those bonds, being part of a community, and then slowly but surely burning through every single one of those connections, either through addiction or being an arsehole, and being left with nothing.

Leslie doesn’t care, at this point. She just wants somewhere to stay and someone to borrow / steal money from for booze. What she really wants, all she really wants is booze.

She stinks, from the booze, and she knows it, but she doesn’t really care. She ends up on her son’s doorstep, who’s now twenty, and though I have no doubt she loves him, she loves booze more. James (Owen Teague) is glad to see his mother, but is very wary. He’s been abandoned before and knows she can’t be trusted, but he has hope anyway.

Maybe this time, he thinks. If only she can stay sober for a couple of days, he thinks.

But she’s searching for money in his and his housemate’s rooms and clothes within seconds of him leaving the place, and the second she finds it, she’s buying a bottle of something and sculling it in the bottle shop, against the protestations of the person working there.

And then she’s “partying” with James, because she knows that in order to keep the booze flowing she needs to entice someone to keep supplying.

It seems like a pattern that worked for years, but not so much now that she’s wrecked, and the path of her addiction has left her emaciated and unwell.

James flips out when he figures out she’s been lying to him, and kicks her out, not before buying her a ticket back to the home town in Texas where she’s a pariah, where her former best friend Nancy (Allison Janney, even more steely-eyed and merciless than usual) loathes her so much I’m amazed Leslie doesn’t spontaneously combust when Nancy looks at her.

Leslie is so trapped, it’s really enervating to watch. It’s draining. Before her son kicks her out she’s all “but James I didn’t lie to you I love you you’re the most important thing to me in the world I’ll never hurt you again” she turns from that to “fuck you, never liked you anyway” in seconds flat.

It’s…familiar. Depending on your life experiences, you might get a certain feeling hearing that kind of instantaneous flip from cajoling manipulation to abuse and cruelty, and back again. I guess it depends on which side you experienced it from, sometimes from both. It certainly inspires a certain amount of shame…

Drug and alcohol addiction narratives are also very familiar (outside of our own experiences) in cinema and novels and such. They’re pretty common, people have been living through them (or not) for centuries, for millennia, probably. They usually follow a certain arc. They generally involve redemption of some sort; that one thing that if they achieve, means they’ll be able to get back to where they were before the addiction wrecked everything.

Usually, they’re middle class narratives. The person who had it all and lost it, if they only give up whatever was killing them and alienating everyone else, well, they’ll be able to go back to that middle class lifestyle.

This is not a middle class narrative, in To Leslie. Regardless of what actually happens in the flick, Leslie has practically no incentive to stop drinking. If she gives up drinking, she’s got nothing, anyway. If she gets sober, well, she’s be a sober homeless person.

There’s no religious grace to tempt her, there’s no illusion of becoming part of her family again, there’s no happy families with her son, since he’s too old for that and too damaged by her, there’s no AA higher power to give up her willpower to.

There’s just going to be a sober Leslie, in this harsh world, that refuses to forgive her, and maybe it shouldn’t.

Of course it doesn’t play out that way, since a kindly man calling himself Sweeney (Marc Maron, completely against type, though he has a long history and familiarity with addiction himself), upon hearing her life story from his friend and workmate Royal (Andre Royo, legendary Bubs from The Wife), instead of thinking “wow, what an absolute irredeemable piece of shit” instead thinks “she could probably do with a hand”, and tries to help her, with a job and with a way out of her cycles of self-destruction.

Sweeney is wary, but somehow trusting. Leslie is wary, and also still a drunk, so she mistrusts everyone especially herself. As much as I appreciated that the flick wasn’t going to be a non-stop sequence of humiliations for Leslie, Sweeney’s dogged support seems almost too good to be true. It’s narratively convenient, sure, but it doesn’t feel entirely unearned. When Leslie stops drinking, it’s days before she’s not sick all the time, which at least felt accurate, but the world doesn’t just magically get easier even when she’s sober.

On a trip to a state fair, with line dancing and all, even when she has moments of glimpsing what life could be like if she’s not at the bottom of a bottle all the time, this shitty small town shows that it will never, ever fucking forget what she did before, no matter what she does or doesn’t do in the future.

Somehow this flick works towards something close to a state of grace towards the end. There isn’t the great cathartic scenes of people exclaiming this or that, or making promises that can’t be kept, or mentioning singular monstrous things that happened in childhood that made them the way they are, as if to explain everything. But it gives us hope, like Leslie has hope, that if she stays off the booze, and doesn’t hurt herself and the people around, maybe life can be okay.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t balling my eyes out at the end. I think Andrea Riseborough gives an outstanding performance in this flick, especially because it’s not showy, it’s not charming, it’s not witty, and it’s all about bone-deep hurt that cannot heal. I don’t like (at all) the idea of actors seemingly debasing themselves onscreen for critical acclaim or awards and such, but I just found it compelling to watch someone so wrecked trying to piece their lives back together, even when they look like they don’t believe it’s every going to happen.

It gives hope to fuck ups everywhere, whether in shitkicker small town Texas or suburban Melbourne.

8 times the only erotic content in the flick is whenever she takes the first deep drink of the day out of 10

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“Good Christian people raised you right and you ruined that sweet boy's life!”
“And what did you do to fucking stop me?” – Jesus lets someone down yet again - To Leslie