Still, this is an impressive character portrait. Leslie often acts as if any hand extended to her is an opening to get more. (She doesn't just ask Sweeney for an advance on pay for a job she hasn't started yet, she gets him to hand her cash on the spot.) And she has trouble delivering on promises she makes and duties she accepts. Sooner or later, she brings chaos and sourness to every interaction. The result is syllogism, or a self-fulfilling prophecy: something like, I am a disaster, therefore I make disasters. Of course Leslie is not as bad as her worst enemies say (or as that voice in her head keeps insisting), but she's guilty of grave offenses, and the film (mainly through Sweeney and Nancy) refuses to let her off the hook for them. (Maron's own, much-discussed experience as a recovering alcoholic lends some of Sweeney's dialogue more gravitas than it would've had if another performer had delivered it.)
Morris' simple shots and careful staging often focus our attention on what's happening inside Leslie rather than whatever external events are triggering her reaction. The result is more than a mere showcase for Riseborough, who anchors every scene. Her performance is so determined not to pander to the audience or celebrate her own virtuosity that it often makes you feel as if you're seeing not an established international actress, but a newcomer playing a version of herself.
Morris' direction offers other filmmakers a template for how to make a small movie that feels big, just by making definitive choices and sticking to them. In an early scene, Leslie is present for a brawl in a hallway: we see her in-focus in the foreground, reacting in profile as the fight happens out-of-focus in the background. In a later scene, Leslie spends the night in an abandoned ice cream shack across from the motel and watches through a slat in the blinds as Royal, an acid-head and conspiracy theorist, bays at the moon in his undershorts and then races across the parking lot to give Sweeney a hug. There are only two shots in the sequence: Leslie watching, and her point-of-view of people doing things far away (the extreme distance makes their actions funnier).
The film's tour-de-force, for the lead actress as well as the filmmakers, is an unbroken tracking shot of Leslie sitting at a bar at closing time, listening to a song whose lyrics seem to be a withering comment on her life ("Is this a joke?" she says to the ceiling) then listening to the entire song as the camera inches closer to her. This isn't the moment when things turn around for Leslie, but it's the start of the start of something better. Riseborough's face lets us imagine all of the decisions and reversals, recriminations and justifications, that might be cycling through the character's mind. As a bravura piece of close-up silent acting, it's up there with Robert De Niro in "GoodFellas" imagining the bloodbath that his character is about to unleash, Diane Lane on a commuter train in "Unfaithful" delightedly recalling a tryst, Nicole Kidman at the symphony in "Birth," and other great moments in acting. Long, uninterrupted closeups of people thinking are a big part of what makes cinema a unique art form, and "To Leslie," to its credit, is built around them.
Now playing in theaters and available on VOD.
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