‘To Leslie’ Review: Andrea Riseborough Takes Raw Command in a Lacerating Drama of Alcoholism Run Amok
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor 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 human mood ring, you can descend into the kind of degraded dishevelment that’s the lower-depths version of an awards-bait transformation.
Yet to give a truly remarkable performance as an alcoholic, you have to make good on the old line about it — that someone who’s drunk is working hard not to act that way.
They’re trying to fool the world in the same way they fool themselves.In “To Leslie,” Andrea Riseborough 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.
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