Movie Masterworks

“Ben: You can never, never ask me to stop drinking. Do you understand?”
“Sera: I do. I really do.”

Synopsis: Best Actor Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage and Best Actress Nominee Elisabeth Shue set the screen ablaze in this profoundly moving love story. Nominated for two additional Academy Awards® - Best Director and Best Screenplay - this emotionally charged powerhouse of a film graced over 100 “10 Best Lists,” including Roger Ebert’s number one Movie of the Year. Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a career alcoholic who has hit rock bottom. Trashing all personal and professional ties to his L.A. existence, he sets off for the lights of Vegas on a mission: to drink himself to death. There he meets Sera (Shue), a beautiful, seen-it-all hooker. From the moment Ben and Sera connect, they form a unique bond based upon unconditional acceptance and mutual respect that will change each of them forever. In the words of David Thompson of ‘Los Angeles Magazine’, ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ is “a masterpiece”.

Critique: Imbued with all the emotional acuity of a beautifully composed suicide note, “Leaving Las Vegas” is a difficult movie to watch. It hurts and it numbs and it courts heartbreak. There’s nothing conventionally entertaining in this small character study, nothing that redeems the ruined love of its two archetypal characters — the drunk and the whore. Any break in the bleakness is undermined by the inevitability of dissipation and doom; the abject yet certain knowledge that no one can save he who will not be saved.

Nicolas Cage plays the terminal alcoholic Ben Sanderson as a man who has come to the end of the world yet insists on dangling his feet in the abyss. By turns comic and boorish, shattered and sweet, Cage swims through the movie with a liberating disengagement. As the other half of the subterranean couple, the girl-next-doorish Elisabeth Shue works against type. Shue manages a daring, surprisingly tough performance that nearly equals Cage’s — albeit in a much less flashy role. She comes across as cool and dangerous.

Mike Figgis, the English director who also wrote the script and score for the movie, gives us a lurid, jittery, hand-held look at this dolorous couple and the color-soaked city that contains them. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a brilliantly realized tone poem. It is a cauterizing movie — it burns like bourbon splashed on an exposed heart.

-by Philip Martin

My thoughts: What makes Leaving Las Vegas so powerful is the connection between outcasts Ben and Sera. All they have is each other. It’s a movie about love and despair in their tragic relationship. I became involved. As Leaving Las Vegas came to it’s inevitable conclusion, I realized this movie was an experience that would stay with me for a long long time.