A Few Thoughts On Film To Leslie

 Watched it with my wife. Had to rent it but I’m glad I did. 

I think it’s a terrific small movie that suffers not in its excellence by being small. And thats its arc is predictable bothers me not at all. 

Of course Riseborough is spectacular in it. (I checked out the “controversy.” What horseshit! A listers going all out to try to ensure Riseborough gets her due. I’m all for them doing it. She deserves the nomination and if publicizing her by feting her got her there I’m glad for it, even as the academy awards mean little to me.) 

I saw someone say her presence outstrips the movie (maybe like Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine.) I don’t agree with that in To Leslie though it’s true about Blue Jasmine. She is the movie; it’s about her and while her performance stands out she doesn’t overpower everything else. Rather there’s a symbiosis between her and everything else that’s effectively mutually reinforcing. 

In Blue Jasmine, what’s not Blanchett is Woody Allen at his most formulaic and flat. And even as in To Leslie the arc is predictable and we sniff out about 1/2 way, though in a very broad way, how it will end, the movement to the ending is organic —ok with maybe a dash of the formulaic. 

Btw, Allison Janney is utterly potent as the queen bitch. I’m not sure I was 100% persuaded by her final turn around though its effectiveness is helped by her hate-filled bitchiness in the midst of that turnaround as she machine guns Leslie with how awful it was how she abandoned her kid. 

Mind you, when she says she was at fault too in not stopping Leslie when she could have, as though there’s some equivalence between their faults, that seems misconceived to me. The way Leslie’s then raging drunkenness/alcoholism is described, there’s no way a friend’s stern warnings could’ve abated it. So that didn’t ring true to me. 

I also thought the Royal character was too much of an unconvincing distraction even though it fit in with the generally idea of wrecking yourself with booze and drugs. His howling at the moon, prancing around in his underwear or even naked is to me unneeded filigree, caricature.

There’s of course a lot more to be said about the film—Marc Maron, the music supplementing the action, the scene where he dumbly but with good intentions plays the tape of her winning the lottery, the scenes of her resisting drinking and so on—but I’ll leave it here.

8/10 is my score for it, if I were scoring it.