LEAVING LAS VEGAS
A Dreary Honeymoon in Vegas
A film review by Chuck Stevens
Copyright 1995 Chuck Stevens
This being 1995, misery and self-destruction are hardly unexplored topics in the cinematic world; admittedly, the advent of what has come to be considered Generation X cinema has lent angst a distinctly shallow feel, but there is still room for legitimate exploration of the themes it implies. But it is not often that the despair depicted on screen is quite as palpable, or as strangely compelling, as in Mike Figgis' LEAVING LAS VEGAS, currently on limited release in theaters, starring Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. It isn't that the events portrayed are particularly novel movie fare, or even that the characters are especially real: it's that the dreariness, for this is a profoundly dreary movie, comes within the context of more dreariness, surrounded by, well, you get the idea. That the events and characters, by turns tragic and pathetic, seem absolutely normal and unremarkable, lends LEAVING LAS VEGAS, as a cinematic and cultural statement, considerable power.
The plot tells only half the story. Cage (perfectly cast, extraordinally comvincing) depicts Ben, an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who, upon being fired, heads to Las Vegas to drink himself to death; on his first night there, he picks up a prostitute named Sera (Shue, also entirely believable) who finds him interesting and eventually convinces him to move in with her. Figgis (who also wrote the screenplay) is not particularly interested in a redemptive-love-story theme, though: Ben's self-destruction goes on unabated and largely unremarked upon, and the relationship at the center of the film is among its victims. We see extensive segments from a perspective that mirrors his: disjointed, marked by flashbacks, blackouts, delusions, and a heightening sense of diminishing control. Sera, for her part, struggles with an abusive pimp and more abusive customers, and steadily wearies of saving Ben from himself; they eventually separate, accelerating his breakdown, and their reconciliation comes too late to rescue him.
But LEAVING LAS VEGAS is not a love story, in any real sense, nor is it about alcoholism. The sex scenes--of which there is no short supply--are largely mechanical, joyless, whether they involve Ben and Sera or Sera and one (or more) of her clients. Sex, here, is simply sex for its own sake; emotional attachment is not a related concept. The alcohol abuse is ongoing and marks every scene, including those where Ben is seemingly stable and self-aware: while the viewer recognizes alcohol's effects, there are no scenes of relative happiness or coherence due to Ben's putting down the bottle for a bit, as might be expected if the aim were solely to dramatize alcoholism. Drinking simply exists--again, for its own sake. The mood of the soundtrack alternates between bluesy and peculiarly jaunty, making it hard to take the story entirely as tragedy; finding pathos in self-destruction is hard when the story is set to bouncy, even raucous, music. The opening shot shows Ben walking down a grocery aisle tossing bourbon and whiskey into a shopping cart--but the hard-edged jazz beat behind the scene undercuts any sense of that sequence as ominous or disturbing. He lives to drink, and he drinks to die: sadness at the concept comes only from a removed perspective.
The failure of the relationship of the two characters further undermines any sense of a renewing force, a redeeming feature. When Ben moves in, Sera buys him gifts, prominent among them, astoundingly, a gold hip flask. The camera lingers on the object for a while, as if to say, yes, she really did it: clearly, this is not a scenario where love struggles against the effects of drink. Rather, love (or whatever approximates it) serves to aid and abet the process of disintegration. No sense of future intrudes on their life--and the grimness is reinforced by a lighting scheme where shadows are heavy, pervasive. Discussions of their relationship are invariably tied to sex: should they have it, what does it mean, etc., and it is over sex--his bringing home a prostitute, in a scene redolent with irony--that they go their separate ways. In all the time he lives with her, she makes no apparent effort to halt his slide: she sympathizes, when drinking leads to uncontrollable rage or shaking helplessness, but she does nothing. To extrapolate this attitude into a larger cultural statement about life choices, and our willingness to see and condemn self-destructive behavior, may seem like something of a stretch, but the tone of this film supports that notion.
Essentially, the movie concerns itself with certain actions, actions that come to mark and define two lives: sex and alcohol abuse. We are immersed in--no, barraged by images of these behaviors, to the point where they seem distinctly unremarkable: by the end of the movie, the viewer is hard-pressed to be shocked by the meaninglessness of the sex scenes or the deliberateness of the alcoholic self-immolation, because, well, the viewer has already seen two hours of similar fare. So, it seems, goes life in this particular culture (Las Vegas, high and low society): nothing is wrong, as such, since everything has been and will continue to be done. The one truly vivid scene in the movie comes, fittingly, outside the city: Ben and Sera have gone to a motel for a few days, and after they make a scene (in a weird fusion of drinking and sex) and manage to break a glass table, the hotel manager, a steel-eyed woman in her 50's, advises Sera to leave and not to "cut her little hands" on the glass, and tells them, in a tone balancing irritation and contempt, to clear out in the morning. That hotel manager's line, "We get a lot of screw-ups here," gives the viewer a sense--a fleeting sense--of external standards, of real people without sympathy or understanding for what Las Vegas represents. That moment of perspective is brief, naturally: we promptly return to the city and all it represents. But that one moment--when the music stops and sunlight replaces neon, faces are out of shadow--made me think that Figgis has something to say with this movie, something not strictly related either to sex or to alcohol.
To make a movie about pain and anguish, a movie with essentially two characters, grim without turning it into tragedy or camp is not easy, and Figgis does well to avoid that end. But it also says something about his perspective that the love relationship seems so shallow: her final tearful protestation that she "loved him" seems meaningless, artificial, given what has come before. The effectiveness of the message underscores the strength of the performances by both Cage and Shue; each depiction is intensely persuasive. (Cage's best moments are in extremis: this is real drunkenness, alternating between the obnoxious and the self-pitying. And Shue's weary resignation as she goes about her work gives us a sort of pained understanding of what she goes through.) The brilliance of the acting saves the movie, which might easily have become unwatchable (as it is, you may often need to look away); while I cannot recommend LEAVING LAS VEGAS to anyone looking to enjoy an evening, it is, in its own way, compelling.
-- Chuck Stevens dsteven1@cc.swarthmore.edu stevens@condor.sccs.swarthmore.edu 610-690-3824
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews