For an actor, there’s an obvious showboat appeal to playing a serious out-of-control drunk. You can fight, you can rage, you can tap your inner party animal, you can rotate through emotions like a …
plays a small-town West Texas single mother who’s a total desperate been-around-the-bend basket case, the kind of alcoholic who has messed up her life so badly that she’s got nothing left. Riseborough’s performance is nothing short of spectacular. She doesn’t compromise, she doesn’t hold back, but she doesn’t endow the character with any sort of fake flamboyance.
Flashing forward to Leslie in her current state, we don’t have to be told what happened to the money. It’s obvious. She drank it away , and now she’s like a pale alien with staring eyes and a ratty tangle of half-dark, half-platinum hair, cadging vodka shots with a pint chaser or getting tossed out of the motel where she’s been living, because none of the monthly tenants will lend her any more cash.
For most of the movie, there’s no teaspoon of feel-good sugar to make the drama of addictive agony go down. “To Leslie” is a torn-from-the-gut experience — probably the best portrayal of addiction in working-class Middle America since Vera Farmiga played a cocaine-addict superstore cashier in “Down to the Bone.
A lesser drama would have been all about how mother and son bond again. In this one, Leslie gets booted back to her hometown, where everybody knows everybody, and she’s an infamous fallen figure — the Lotto winner who blew it all and now haunts the bars in her too-bright red lipstick, coming on to this or that cowboy. Riseborough shows us something remarkable: a grin that’s buried unless Leslie is so blotto that she can feel her sexiness again.
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