Andrea Riseborough as a recovering alcoholic is the best thing about To Leslie, says Julia Hamilton.
In her latest film, To Leslie, Andrea Riseborough plays a small-town, West Texas single mother, a complete basket case of a rock-bottom drunk who’s made such a mess of her life that she is bankrupt on all fronts: physically, spiritually, mentally. The opening credits play over a tellingly smudged montage of snapshots of Leslie from better days, culminating in a TV clip of her winning the lottery in her local town, six years before, hollering with drunken joy at her incredible luck. Tellingly, her 13-year-old son skulks at the edges of the crowd of people surrounding her, looking embarrassed, as if he can already see the future.
