Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue make Leaving Las Vegas painfully convincing as a meeting of lonely people. We recommend it for their humour and tenderness, with reservations about Mike Figgis’s tendency to make despair look desirable.
Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas asks us to spend time with a man who intends to drink himself to death, and to understand why somebody might love him. It is a hard invitation, but the film earns our attention and, often, our affection. Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue make it worth accepting, even when Figgis becomes too taken with the romance of despair. Adapted by Figgis from John O’Brien’s novel, the story gives Ben Sanderson and Sera a relationship that offers no easy reassurance.
Cage makes Ben’s drinking ugly without treating him as someone whose every word must be a warning. The humour matters: we can see why Sera might want his company, even while his self-destruction remains in view. We laughed more than we expected, because Cage finds comedy in the drunkenness without making the damage disappear. His performance is forceful, but it gives Ben enough personality to keep him from becoming merely an illustration of alcoholism.
Shue’s Sera has the less showy job, and the film depends just as much on her. A woman who earns her living through prostitution could easily be reduced here to somebody whose patience redeems a damaged man. Shue makes that patience feel like something Sera chooses, rather than a quality supplied for Ben’s convenience. We believe she wants his company, even when we struggle to understand how much she accepts. The screenplay gives Ben the more immediately arresting predicament, and Shue has to work harder to make Sera’s loneliness equally important.
Declan Quinn’s cinematography helps make the attraction credible, but it also feeds our main reservation. The visual pleasure can make Ben’s deterioration seem more desirable than the performance does. Waldemar Kalinowski’s production design has to accommodate both a Las Vegas romance and the dire business of this man’s drinking; the surroundings sometimes seem too accommodating to the first. We admire how readily the film draws us towards these people, while wishing it were less pleased with the spectacle of their unhappiness.
John Smith’s editing gives the relationship enough room for Cage’s humour and Shue’s sympathy to register. It is important that they can be engaging company, because sustained distress would soon become numbing without that relief. Figgis also composed the score, and the jazz is unusually effective at letting tenderness into material that might otherwise repel us. It does not make the drinking any less distressing, but it helps explain why spending time together can feel like a reprieve for this couple.
Romantic dramas often make being understood the first step towards getting better, and Figgis gives us no reason to expect that bargain here. The affection still matters, and Cage and Shue persuade us that these people have something to offer each other beyond shared damage. We would not dismiss that tenderness simply because the film sometimes presses it too hard. At 111 minutes, it asks for a manageable stretch of time and a rather less manageable amount of feeling. Choose it for the performances, but not as the compromise between wanting a romance and wanting to be cheered up.
