For its first 35 minutes or so, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande foregrounds one of the most fascinating, maddening conversational duets in a good long while—the kind of extended two-hander that definitely feels like transplanted theater but rarely suffers from that feeling. The characters in question are Leo Grande (natch), a ludicrously handsome young “escort,” and Nancy Stokes, the sixty-ish woman who’s hired him for what neither pretends is anything other than carnal purposes; they meet at a hotel in the film’s opening scene, and the camera doesn’t leave the building until seconds before the closing credits roll. All in all, Nancy books Leo four times, growing progressively bolder in ways both touching and disturbing. But it’s the initial session—the only one in which we don’t witness them do anything sexual—that really sings.
In large part, that’s because it gives Emma Thompson, who plays Nancy, her strongest front-and-center showcase since…I’d say at least since Sense and Sensibility, if not The Remains of the Day. It’s been a while. Katy Brand wrote Leo Grande’s screenplay (actually, she gets the unusual credit “written and created by,” as if this were a TV series; it premiered at Sundance in January, then went straight to Hulu), and deserves a lot of credit for how beautifully that first encounter plays. Still, she can’t possibly have anticipated the disarming, idiosyncratic ways in which Thompson would turn neurotic logorrhea into an art form. Nancy can’t believe she’s doing this, can’t believe that Leo’s willing to do it, can’t believe how pathetic her relentless disbelief sounds. We see half an hour of session #1 unfold in something like real time, and she spends it manically deflecting, desperate to avoid the very thing she openly desires. At one point, after Leo claims that he’s never had a client he didn’t find attractive on some level, Nancy asks “What’s the little thing you can hold onto about me with…all your might…to make it come alive in the moment?”; I set those three words off in ellipses and italics because Thompson mutters them to herself with a quiet ferocity of self-loathing that breaks your heart.
Of course, she’s not acting by herself. In a crucial and invigorating way, though, she kinda is. The IMDb confirms that this film was my first sight of one Daryl McCormack (his most notable previous credit seems to be a recurring role on the British TV series Peaky Blinders), and the guy’s been given a remarkably difficult task: Give this woman nothing while seeming to give her everything. Whenever Nancy goes into the bathroom, leaving him alone for a moment, we see that “Leo Grande” (not his real name; neither is Nancy Stokes hers) is a character the man plays, though the mask-drop is magnificently subtle—just a wordless temporary relaxation and readjustment. Leo’s job, at all times, is to say whatever he thinks will put Nancy at ease, and the result is a warm, kind, empathetic, and yet weirdly Teflon performance. Nancy finds this frustrating even as she bathes in the flattery, and keeps trying to goad him into dropping his guard. It’s a jarring clash of jagged and smooth, like a nail file working on herbal body wash.
I’ve now spent roughly half of this review describing a first-rate short film, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande runs 97 minutes. And it starts to lose its footing in the transition from session one to session two, which hinges on a void that becomes incoherent. The instant that Leo and Nancy finally get down to business, the film leaps ahead to next time, at which point the same tentative dance just starts over again. Nancy asks Leo to take off his shirt and seems utterly overwhelmed while touching his bare chest—a reaction that would have been deeply moving and wholly credible in the previous sequence, as we learned that Nancy has slept with only one man (her recently deceased, grotesquely anti-romantic husband) in her entire life. But flesh as revelation doesn’t make sense when the other body was your personal love slave a couple of weeks earlier. It’s as if Brand and director Sophie Hyde think that so long as we didn’t actually see it, they can pretend it didn’t happen, even as both characters make clear reference to it.
Still, that’s in the nature of a quibble. What deflates Leo Grande from special to ordinary is the duo’s overall dynamic, which grows repetitive even as it shifts into a more conventional register. Visually, the film never abandons a very basic rotation of medium close-ups and staggered two-shots; few things demand more compositional skill than two people talking intimately at length in a single room; you need to be a Bergman or a Rohmer to pull it off, and even those legends struggled with the challenge when they started out. Hyde has directed two previous narrative features (52 Tuesdays and Animals, both unseen by me) and seems intently focused on her actors, which eventually leads to a certain monotony. That’s exacerbated by the script’s efforts to generate greater dramatic conflict. Session three delivers a full-fledged meltdown, with Nancy calling Leo by his real name and revealing that she discovered his identity via Internet sleuthing. This isn’t an inherently misguided direction to take the story, but Brand’s imagination fails her, and she betrays both characters as established. Nancy, we’re meant to believe, somehow thought that Leo—who’s been almost sociopathically reticent about revealing himself, offering up only those details that might steer the subject back to Nancy’s pleasure—would find his exposure gratifying, be charmed or touched that she was curious enough to dig up his info. And while Leo’s impulse to immediately cancel the session and leave feels exactly right, Brand can’t resist having him forget his phone and quickly return, cueing up a rant that releases the dam of his pent-up resentment about Nancy grilling him.
Ultimately, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a stronger and more rewarding film when it’s “unfairly” one-sided, exploring an older woman’s erotic fantasies—and her societally-imposed misgivings about even having them, much less acting upon them—while keeping the title character a compelling cipher. Thompson virtually never sets a foot wrong, ensuring that we reject Nancy’s perception of herself as pathetic and undesirable even as she issues a torrent of anxiety to that effect. And while describing what Thompson does in the very last scene as “fearless” risks cliché—99% of the time, that adjective in this context signifies a woman taking her clothes off to reveal a body not sculpted by perfect genetics plus endless hours at the gym—the cliché is true in this instance. Leo Grande serves up more or less what’s written on its tin (British phrase, but, hey, it’s a British film), and tackles a subject that even art films largely avoid. But it appears genuinely radical for a good long while, and I’m a bit crushed that it’s not.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
In large part, that’s because it gives Emma Thompson, who plays Nancy, her strongest front-and-center showcase since…I’d say at least since Sense and Sensibility, if not The Remains of the Day. It’s been a while. Katy Brand wrote Leo Grande’s screenplay (actually, she gets the unusual credit “written and created by,” as if this were a TV series; it premiered at Sundance in January, then went straight to Hulu), and deserves a lot of credit for how beautifully that first encounter plays. Still, she can’t possibly have anticipated the disarming, idiosyncratic ways in which Thompson would turn neurotic logorrhea into an art form. Nancy can’t believe she’s doing this, can’t believe that Leo’s willing to do it, can’t believe how pathetic her relentless disbelief sounds. We see half an hour of session #1 unfold in something like real time, and she spends it manically deflecting, desperate to avoid the very thing she openly desires. At one point, after Leo claims that he’s never had a client he didn’t find attractive on some level, Nancy asks “What’s the little thing you can hold onto about me with…all your might…to make it come alive in the moment?”; I set those three words off in ellipses and italics because Thompson mutters them to herself with a quiet ferocity of self-loathing that breaks your heart.
Of course, she’s not acting by herself. In a crucial and invigorating way, though, she kinda is. The IMDb confirms that this film was my first sight of one Daryl McCormack (his most notable previous credit seems to be a recurring role on the British TV series Peaky Blinders), and the guy’s been given a remarkably difficult task: Give this woman nothing while seeming to give her everything. Whenever Nancy goes into the bathroom, leaving him alone for a moment, we see that “Leo Grande” (not his real name; neither is Nancy Stokes hers) is a character the man plays, though the mask-drop is magnificently subtle—just a wordless temporary relaxation and readjustment. Leo’s job, at all times, is to say whatever he thinks will put Nancy at ease, and the result is a warm, kind, empathetic, and yet weirdly Teflon performance. Nancy finds this frustrating even as she bathes in the flattery, and keeps trying to goad him into dropping his guard. It’s a jarring clash of jagged and smooth, like a nail file working on herbal body wash.
I’ve now spent roughly half of this review describing a first-rate short film, but Good Luck to You, Leo Grande runs 97 minutes. And it starts to lose its footing in the transition from session one to session two, which hinges on a void that becomes incoherent. The instant that Leo and Nancy finally get down to business, the film leaps ahead to next time, at which point the same tentative dance just starts over again. Nancy asks Leo to take off his shirt and seems utterly overwhelmed while touching his bare chest—a reaction that would have been deeply moving and wholly credible in the previous sequence, as we learned that Nancy has slept with only one man (her recently deceased, grotesquely anti-romantic husband) in her entire life. But flesh as revelation doesn’t make sense when the other body was your personal love slave a couple of weeks earlier. It’s as if Brand and director Sophie Hyde think that so long as we didn’t actually see it, they can pretend it didn’t happen, even as both characters make clear reference to it.
Still, that’s in the nature of a quibble. What deflates Leo Grande from special to ordinary is the duo’s overall dynamic, which grows repetitive even as it shifts into a more conventional register. Visually, the film never abandons a very basic rotation of medium close-ups and staggered two-shots; few things demand more compositional skill than two people talking intimately at length in a single room; you need to be a Bergman or a Rohmer to pull it off, and even those legends struggled with the challenge when they started out. Hyde has directed two previous narrative features (52 Tuesdays and Animals, both unseen by me) and seems intently focused on her actors, which eventually leads to a certain monotony. That’s exacerbated by the script’s efforts to generate greater dramatic conflict. Session three delivers a full-fledged meltdown, with Nancy calling Leo by his real name and revealing that she discovered his identity via Internet sleuthing. This isn’t an inherently misguided direction to take the story, but Brand’s imagination fails her, and she betrays both characters as established. Nancy, we’re meant to believe, somehow thought that Leo—who’s been almost sociopathically reticent about revealing himself, offering up only those details that might steer the subject back to Nancy’s pleasure—would find his exposure gratifying, be charmed or touched that she was curious enough to dig up his info. And while Leo’s impulse to immediately cancel the session and leave feels exactly right, Brand can’t resist having him forget his phone and quickly return, cueing up a rant that releases the dam of his pent-up resentment about Nancy grilling him.
Ultimately, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a stronger and more rewarding film when it’s “unfairly” one-sided, exploring an older woman’s erotic fantasies—and her societally-imposed misgivings about even having them, much less acting upon them—while keeping the title character a compelling cipher. Thompson virtually never sets a foot wrong, ensuring that we reject Nancy’s perception of herself as pathetic and undesirable even as she issues a torrent of anxiety to that effect. And while describing what Thompson does in the very last scene as “fearless” risks cliché—99% of the time, that adjective in this context signifies a woman taking her clothes off to reveal a body not sculpted by perfect genetics plus endless hours at the gym—the cliché is true in this instance. Leo Grande serves up more or less what’s written on its tin (British phrase, but, hey, it’s a British film), and tackles a subject that even art films largely avoid. But it appears genuinely radical for a good long while, and I’m a bit crushed that it’s not.
One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.
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