Starring: Nicholas Cage, Elisabeth Shue & Julian Sands
Reviewer: Brett H.
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“Or, is killing myself a way of drinking?”
Reviewer's Rating: * * * * (4 Stars)
Leaving Las Vegas is one of my favorite films of all time, featuring a typically over the top performance by Nicholas Cage playing a Hollywood screenwriter, Ben, who’s life unravels due to alcoholism. On his final hurrah - a drunken Las Vegas suicide mission, he meets up with a hooker, Sera (Elisabeth Shue) and troubled kindred spirits fall in love in the most subversive sense of the word. They vow to never bring one another’s detracting personality traits into the picture and keep their word until complex human emotion comes along and messes up their simple promise.
The major tragedy of this hapless Romeo & Juliet is that Sera is so independent and Ben is downright bullheaded in his drinking that neither of the two can amass enough clarity to realize that they’ve found at least a momentary happiness worth building upon. What they each seek and what negatives have pent up in their lives didn’t sprout overnight and even though they each see that, Ben seems too set in embracing his faults to identify the problem that at times has nothing to do with said fault at all. Direction is top notch; grainy, dreary and poetic as the solid under cast rounds out one of the finest, yet most depressing films of 1995.
The hooker with a heart of gold story has been an art house staple for decades. Leaving Las Vegas is one of the shining examples of the character study showcased flawlessly by the likes of Fellini and Leone.
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