Whew! Having heard reviewers sing its praises and watching Nicolas Cage receive the Best Actor Academy Award in 1996 for this performance was not enough to prepare me for the experience of watching Leaving Las Vegas. The only word that I can use to describe the experience is “haunting.”
Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) has lost his job at a Hollywood talent agency. It’s the last straw in what seems to be a string of failures in his life. His family, a wife and son, have also gone. Just how they disappeared isn’t made clear, but the effect on Ben is apparent: he’s drinking hard and heavy. After losing his job, he decides to drive to Las Vegas, sell his belongings for booze money and drink himself to death.
Shortly after arriving in Las Vegas, he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute who immediately finds herself attracted to him. After her pimp (Julian Sands) is killed, she takes Ben in and attempts to fill a need in her life much like Ben fills his needs with alcohol.
The movie boils down to a tragic character study of Ben and Sera’s effect on one another. Each provides what the other needs: acceptance. Sera promises Ben that she will not ask him to stop drinking. Ben accepts the fact that she’s a hooker.
The performances are absolutely top-flight. Cage looks convincingly out-of-it while still maintaining a subtle consciousness of how pathetic his character’s become. Shue proves that she’s above such drivel as Cocktail and Adventures in Babysitting.
So, with all of this praise, why did it only receive 4 stars? Well, some of the things the movie asks you to accept don’t slide down the gullet as nicely as the filmmaker’s may have wanted them to. The most disturbing of which is the amount of booze Ben drinks. If Ben ingested as much alcohol as is shown, he’d be dead in the first ten minutes of the film. He downs entire bottles of hard liquor in several gulps. He’d do more than simply stagger after that; he’d expire.
Technicalities aside, Leaving Las Vegas is a powerful exploration of the needs of two tragic people. Ben and Sera are two of the most engaging characters I’ve encountered in the movies in a long time. I appreciated the fact that their rough edges were not polished in typical Hollywood fashion and they remained complex and haunted, much like the type of people they’re based on.
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
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