Review of Leaving Las Vegas (1995) by Edith N — 25 Nov 2010

What Else Is Las Vegas For?

I guess, in retrospect, that this movie must have just made it to Port Angeles late. I know it played there in 1996, because I didn't have a certain group of friends until about February, and all but two of us went to see [i]Oliver and Company[/i], while two others went upstairs to see this instead. And regretted their decision. I think, in retrospect, this is because they were exactly the wrong two people of our group to go see it. She was sweet, but she was the kind of girl who'd go to see a movie she didn't want to with her boyfriend instead of a movie she did with her friends. He . . . was dumb as a brick. They disliked it intensely, both of them, which may be part of why it's taken me so long to see it. There is also the curious lack, which took me until very recently to recognize, of dramas in my life at the time. I suppose, looking back on it, we were all too absorbed with the drama we created for ourselves.

Something has happened in the life of Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage). It does not matter what. However, he knows it and everyone around him knows it, and they know how things will and must end. His friends stop speaking to him; he is fired. He burns his belongings, a near-literal bridge-burning, and drives to Las Vegas. He knows exactly why he is going there. He is going to drink himself to death. (My psychiatrist says a lot of people go to Las Vegas to kill themselves one way or another.) While he is there, he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute working for the abusive Yuri (Julian Sands). But Yuri is killed, and Sera is drawn into Ben's orbit. And, indeed, comparing Ben to a gravity well is not a bad comparison. He sucks her in and makes it extremely difficult to escape. And his one requirement is that she watch him slowly kill himself and never ask him not to.

But I think Sera is doing some bridge-burning of her own. By staying with Ben, she is losing a great number of things. She is better off without some, but I think it rather probable that she is trying to leave herself with no other choice than to, well, leave Las Vegas. She is left with no anchor other than Ben, and we all know how things will end with Ben. He has no chance for redemption, no chance for a happy ending. And so there is nothing but him to hold her in place, and he is himself cutting her other strings. Of course, it is entirely possible that she will just drift the same as Ben, when she loses even that. It's possible she will even drift the same way. But I think it rather more likely that, with nowhere left to go in Las Vegas, there will be the chance for her to find somewhere else. Not that I know where else there is for her or what else she can do, but it leaves her with more of a chance than she had before, I guess.

Some people are just doomed, I guess, especially in the movies. It doesn't matter, in the end, what causes it. We don't even really need to see his beginnings. All that matters is what happens once he sets foot in Las Vegas. We actually don't know what happened to bring Sera there, because Sera only really matters as an extension of Ben's fate. We must see her spiral downward, but only because we must see what would bring the pair of them together. Where she is spiraling from, and if she will manage to climb back up again, doesn't matter. We must see her accept Ben's doom, I think because we need a witness. She stays with him, and she is only willing--able--to remove herself from him when it seems as though he's found another woman to do the job she has taken on for herself. She has her job, and the idea that she has lost even that is too much for her. Even after that, though, she had to come back to keep him from facing that doom on his own. Fate only takes us so far.

This is, I note, the second year in a row that I've watched something horribly depressing and dysfunctional for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure if this is intentional on my part. My family hasn't done a traditional Thanksgiving dinner since I was in sixth grade. I don't like Thanksgiving food anyway; Graham's mother will be giving him leftovers tonight, and I won't eat any of it. My grandmother used to give me a baked potato and leave the roll basket in front of me; I never even ate desert, because I don't like pumpkin or mince pie. It was awkward and unpleasant on an emotional level, too, because it was all with my mother's family, and we don't like each other much. So maybe there's that. Still, for all they may be horrible and dysfunctional movies, at least they've been good horrible and dysfunctional movies. Nicolas Cage hasn't always made the best of movies, but this one is worth watching. And it tells you a great deal about the man that he prepared for the role by getting drunk a lot.