It is near impossible to watch Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and not have your heart pulled from your chest, shaped, prodded, poked and split into two and healed before being placed back in your chest beating furiously and with gloriously, heartwarmingly renewed purpose.
You could possibly say that about a great many films but unlike the more emotionally manipulative end of the spectrum which relies on all kinds of emotive bells and whistles to whip you into a frenzy of sharply vicarious feeling, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does it all, and in an elegantly immersive 1 1/2 hours, with charmingly raw, vulnerably human honesty that strips away any ability you might have to simply sit by and watch the film.
So authentic is this luminously affecting people film, written by Katy Brand and directed by Sophie Hyde, that you experience it rather than simply view it, granting Good Luck to You, Leo Grande a powerful effect that transcends the apparent simplicity of the film itself.
Taking place for the most part in a hotel room, and for one key scene in the same hotel’s anonymous-looking eating area, and starring Emma Thompson in typically superlative form as a widow of two years seeking to make up sexually, and importantly too, emotionally, for lost time, this is a film that on the surface does not have a lot of visual airs and graces.
That’s not to say there isn’t a lot conveyed by the room in which Thompson, playing a retired religious education teacher named Nancy Stokes who refuses life is over for her and that she should just accept the lacklustre hand she has been so far dealt, chooses as the place where she experience all of the sexual diversity denied to her by now-dead husband of 31 years.
As she meets with the charmingly persuasive and (almost) endlessly patient Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), this one small room becomes the acutely manicured backdrop to a wholesale seachange in the way Stokes views and lives her life, and to an extent, Grande too, who is unexpectedly and uncharacteristically exposed in a way the sex worker is not used to experiencing.
So alive is Thompson’s performance in particular, laced with as much laugh out loud as achingly raw vulnerability, pain and longing, and McCormack’s too, that what in any other setting would be just another unremarkable though beautifully appointed hotel room, becomes the stage for Stokes’ reinvention, which ends up being exactly like she wanted and yet welcomingly not at all, and for some inadvertent therapy for Grande who finds himself more deeply affected by his client than he wanted o expected.
In such an intimate film, it is the rapport between the two characters which has to carry what is by any yardstick a brilliantly written, pitch-perfect emotionally resonant screenplay, solely based on immaculately delivered and richly human back and forths.
At no point does the script, or Thompson or McCormack stumble, imbuing Good Luck to You, Leo Grande with a surety of execution and thus a surgically moving exploration of one woman’s desperate though quietly expressed (at least at first) need to find a way through to the rest of her hopefully vastly more satisfying life, one which doesn’t surrender to the banality of the pas but which surges forward to new and exciting possibilities, leaving her, so she hopes far from fading to nothingness like her pallid contemporaries.
For all its earnest seriousness, which underlies the film’s more humourously buoyant first act, rife with Stokes insecurities, fear and jittery longing, before bursting to the fore in the film’s searingly intense but liberatingly alive final act Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is hilariously funny much of the time.
This is not at the expense of either character because clearly Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is not a cheap exploitation of the past pain of two wholly different people finding present expression in wholly different ways, but a film which deeply respects it characters, their humanity and their need to find something worthwhile in life again.
For while this is assuredly Thompson’s film with her character deservedly occupying the majority of the emotional bandwidth, there are affectingly clear moments when Grande, usually while he’s alone waiting for Stokes to find the courage to take yet another step to her new life, drops the veneer of the smooth enabler of sexual dreams and let the vulnerabilities just below the surface flicker momentarily to his face.
The reason why Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is so adept at ripping your heart, exposing it to the startling light of emotional day before healing it and placing it back from whence it came is because the film is so raw and so honest, especially about the grinding disappointments Stokes feels about her life and her fervently nervous need for Grande to help her leave them behind, that it ends up speaking volubly to every single one of us who have wanted more from this thing called life.
This universality, of course, is a byproduct of a film that is first and foremost devoting itself to the way in which many women are forced to shelve their hopes, wants and needs in favour of the welfare of others, all underscored by incessant calls from Stokes’ daughter throughout the film, all of which she habitually answers during her sessions with Grande because, as she tells him, that’s what mothers do, and how even when they do take a step towards their own empowerment they can be undone by the lingering voices of others seeding their self-doubt and reticence to push beyond the boundaries of their sclerotic lives.
It’s a tragedy, and at times feels like an insurmountable one during much of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, even as Stokes takes tremulously transformative steps forward, but the film is at pains to speak to the power of tenacity and hope and to the fact that the moribund of lives can find vibrant new expression past what those living them might fear is their expiry date.
Richly, relatably funny and universally movingly true to the point that you can’t walk out of the cinema unaffected, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a gem of a film powered by performances so intensely raw and comedically honest that you feel every last drop of disappointment, every sliver of hope and every tentative step forward, all of them so specific and yet so universal, that you can’t help but feel as if your soul has been ripped open and remade in ways that feel every bit as profound as the characters on the screen themselves.