Oh, this movie is so sad! It is sad not because
of the tragic lives of its characters, but
because of their goodness and their charity.
What moves me the most in movies is not when
something bad happens, but when characters
act unselfishly. In "Leaving Las Vegas," a
man loses his family and begins to drink himself
to death. He goes to Vegas, and there on the
street he meets a prostitute, who takes him
in and cares for him, and he calls her his
angel. But he doesn't stop drinking.
The man's name is Ben (Nicholas Cage). The
woman's name is Sera (Elisabeth Shue). You
will not see two better performances this
year. Midway in the film someone offers Ben
the insight that his drinking is a way of
killing himself. He smiles lopsidedly and
offers a correction: "Killing myself is a
way of drinking." At one point, after it is
clear that Sera really cares for him, he tells
her, "You can never, ever, ask me to stop
drinking." She replies in a little voice:
"I know." The movie is not really about alcoholism.
It is about great sad passion, of the sort
celebrated in operas like "La Boheme." It
takes place in bars and dreary rented rooms
and the kind of Vegas poverty that includes
a parking space and the use of the pool. The
practical details are not quite realistic
- it would be hard to drink as much as Ben
drinks and remain conscious, and it is unlikely
an intelligent prostitute would allow him
into her life. We brush those objections aside,
because they have nothing to do with the real
subject of this movie, which is that we must
pity one another, and be gentle.
The movie works as a love story, but really
romance is not the point here, any more than
sex is. The story is about two wounded, desperate,
marginal people, and how they create for each
other a measure of grace. One scene after
another finds the right note. If there are
two unplayable roles in the stock repertory,
they are the drunk and the whore with a heart
of gold. Cage and Shue make these cliches
into unforgettable people. Cage's drunkenness
is inspired in part by a performance he studied,
Albert Finney's alcoholic consul in "Under
the Volcano." You sense an observant intelligence
peering from inside the drunken man, seeing
everything, clearly and sadly.
Shue's prostitute is however the crucial role,
because Sera is the one with a choice. She
sees Ben clearly, and decides to stick with
him for the rest of the ride. When he lets
her down badly, toward the end of the movie,
she goes out and does something that no hooker
should do - gets herself into a motel room
with a crowd of drunken college boys - and
we see how she needed Ben because she desperately
needed to do something good for somebody.
He was her redemption, and when it seems he
scorns her gift, she punishes herself.
"Leaving Las Vegas" is one of the best films
of the year, deserving many Academy Award
nominations. That such a film gets made is
a miracle: One can see how this material could
have been softened and compromised, and that
would have been wrong. It is a pure, grand
gesture. That he is an alcoholic and she works
the streets are simply the turnings they have
taken. Beneath their occupations are their
souls. And because Ben essentially has given
up on his, the film becomes Sera's story,
about how even in the face of certain defeat
we can, at least, insist on loving, and trying.
I Would recommend this movie to every movie
lovers out there and giving this movie 8 stars
rating out of 10.
