There are lots of movies about alcoholics and about prostitutes with a heart of gold. There are even more love stories, and there are many that take place in Las Vegas. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a film about so much more, and it is so devastating and shockingly unreal, it becomes really one of the most moving and heartbreaking tragic romances ever made.
The film follows Nicolas Cage in his Oscar winning performance as Ben Sanderson, a notorious drunkard unlike any ever seen on camera. Cage’s work even within the first 10 minutes of the film before the title credits roll defines him as the epitome of all drunk performances. He is so preposterously absent minded and immersed in his performance that every time he’s on screen we are in awe of this monstrosity, sometimes to comic effect.
After losing his job, he uproots his life and escapes to Las Vegas where he intends to “drink himself to death.” When he meets Sera, played equally brilliantly by Elisabeth Shue, he imagines her to be his angel, someone with whom he wants to do nothing more but be with.
Sera’s development as a character is really the more dramatic one, and in a way she becomes the real focus of the film. In psychiatrist scenes punctuated with jump cuts, she reveals how she can become anyone the man she’s sleeping with wants in bed. She embodies their fantasies, but the remarkably sad thing about her character is that in this way, she is equally as absent minded as Ben.
The two bond over the acceptance they get from the other. For her, she feels like she has an identity when she’s with Ben, and for Ben, he has found someone that will not judge him no matter what. The two characters are tragic, hopeless and depressing, but their chemistry is undeniable and often romantic and charming in a bizarre way. How Elisabeth Shue did not also win an Oscar for her agonizingly good and deep performance while working off the biggest, most insane drunk in movie history, is beyond me.
But what sets the film apart is Mike Figgis’s enchanting visual style and cinematic flair. From jump cuts to low light filters to paranoid editing and cross cutting to the soulful piano score he wrote himself, “Leaving Las Vegas” draws you in like nothing else. It becomes a thousand times more and a thousand times more effective than any standard drama about an alcoholic. The movie lives and breathes this drunken madness, and it’s brilliant.