creatures
of the night
leaving las vegas
from dusk till dawn |
director/screenwriter
Mike Figgis
based on
the novel by
John O'Brien
producers
Lila Cazès
Annie Stewart
cinematographer
Declan Quinn
music
Mike Figgis
Anthony Marinelli
editor
John Smith
cast
Nicolas Cage (Ben Sanderson)
Elisabeth Shue (Sera)
Julian Sands (Yuri)
Richard Lewis (Peter)
Steven Weber (Marc)
Emily Procter (Debbie)
Valeria Golino (Terri)
Carey Lowell (Bank Teller)
Lucinda Jenney (Weird Woman)
French Stewart (Businessman)
Ed Lauter (Mobster)
Mike Figgis (Mobster)
R. Lee Ermey (Conventioneer)
Mariska Hargitay (Hooker at Bar)
Laurie Metcalf (Landlady)
Shawnee Smith (Biker Girl)
Julian Lennon (Bartender)
Bob Rafelson (Man at Mall)
Xander Berkeley (Cynical Cabbie)
Lou Rawls (Concerned Cabbie)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: 10/27/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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The key to understanding Leaving
Las Vegas is that it's only marginally about alcoholism.
Yes, the main character, down-and-out screenwriter Ben Sanderson
(Nicolas Cage), could drink Dudley Moore's Arthur under the table
and still walk a straight line. But what you get isn't the usual
When a Man Loves a Woman TV-movie-of-the-week, in which
Ben slowly and painfully pulls himself out of the hell of oblivion.
For Ben, oblivion is heaven. It doesn't take long to realize
what Leaving Las Vegas is going to be: a two-hour-long
suicide. Ben's life is pretty much over -- his marriage is history,
he can't get arrested in Hollywood -- and he decides to go out
on his own terms, candidly admitting his plan to drink himself
to death.
This road is slower than, say, OD-ing on heroin, and much faster
than eating oneself to death, like the poor bastard in
Seven.
The lingering, bitter execution by the bottle has a dark glamour,
and the writer-director, Mike Figgis (Internal Affairs),
doesn't deny it. Figgis doesn't gasp in horror at what Ben is
doing to himself, nor does he make it look like fun. What he
does do is almost impossible to sustain. The most effective addiction
movies tantalize us with the early scenes of the protagonist
compulsively indulging his needs; then there's usually a big
splashdown, and while the protagonist inches his way back to
sanity, we do penance for our voyeuristic enjoyment of his decline.
Disintegration is an old and perversely satisfying tradition
in drama, but it's only socially acceptable to enjoy it as long
as we understand that healing and redemption are just around
the corner. In Leaving Las Vegas, Figgis presents disintegration
as a state of grace. He doesn't romanticize alcoholism or suicide,
but he does suggest the intensification of feeling in the midst
of numbness. Adapting a novel by John O'Brien, who killed himself
two weeks after Figgis had committed to the project, Figgis goes
well beyond the slickness of his previous movies. The film is
trancelike and intimate, cool but not cold, with an erotic glow
that provides a comforting (and sometimes disturbing) contrast
of warmth.
In a possible nod to Taxi Driver, Ben almost runs over
a Vegas hooker, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), and is immediately smitten
with her. Ben takes her back to his ratty hotel room and pays
her for a night of service, which amounts to a night of lying
around talking, since Ben can't perform. Sera is touched and
intrigued by this gentle, rambling, self-destructive man, and
thus begins one of the darkest, most mysterious romances in modern
movies. Sera's Eurotrash pimp Yuri (Julian Sands) is the flip
side of Ben: he's self-destructive, too, but he's also vicious
and cold. Her scenes with Yuri are meant to show us what she's
glad to leave behind -- not hooking (which she continues), but
hooking for an abusive jerk -- but Julian Sands doesn't have
the seductive aura of danger that, say, Harvey Keitel did in
Taxi Driver. Yuri is killed off early in the movie, and
I expected this to have some bearing on the rest of the story,
but it doesn't. Perhaps it's to show the contrast between Yuri,
a screw-up who takes his sickness out on Sera, and Ben, a screw-up
who generally only takes his sickness out on himself (which,
in this movie's terms, is semi-heroic). Maybe Figgis also wanted
to avoid the typical scenes of Yuri getting jealous of Ben and
trying to kill him. The pimp isn't important to Figgis, anyway.
The heart of the movie is Ben and Sera, the walking dead who
find life in death.
Nicolas Cage keeps Ben a mystery to us, yet he gives us access
to his emotions. The performance is all over the place and tightly
contained at the same time. Is Ben believable as a person? Not
really, and that's not really the point. Ben is abstract, but
not in the hip, unfeeling way that the characters in Heat
were. As a character, Ben is like the lurching, discordant, unpredictable
jazz on the soundtrack (which Figgis composed). Cage's performance
is a long, bluesy riff on self-annihilation, and this works better
than a hyper-realistic characterization, in which a lesser actor
might pull together a boring, analytical portrait that details
how Ben got this way. Cage couldn't care less how Ben got this
way -- Ben is this way, and that's all that matters. Ben
may not be "real" -- Figgis admits as much when we
first see Ben filling a shopping cart with booze -- but his emotions
are, and they're not emotions we often encounter in a movie.
Ben knows what he wants, and Sera's love doesn't change what
he wants. Yet she's more to him than just a distraction on the
way to death. She treats him with the gentleness that he can't
and won't give himself.
Elisabeth Shue actually has the tougher role. The phrase "hooker
with a heart of gold" never once entered my head, though
it easily could have. Sera wants to give Ben love in the only
way she thinks she can, through sex, but she doesn't realize
that the impotent Ben gets something from her that transcends
sex. Shue, whose comeback clearly begins here, makes us feel
Sera's frustration and shifting affection for Ben, her yearning
for peace. We've seen similar prostitutes many times before in
movies -- the hooker redeemed by the love of a good man -- but
what's new about Shue's performance is its lack of obvious masochism.
Whereas Jennifer Jason Leigh might have brought seething self-disgust
to the role, Shue gives us a woman who, like Ben, accepts exactly
what she is. Sera's awakening is moving not just because she
responds to Ben's basic decency but because she's confused, and
then comforted, by the kindness she didn't know she still had
in her. If Ben isn't quite "real," Sera is real enough
for both of them.
Leaving Las Vegas is most certainly not for everyone --
not for the literal-minded, anyway (I've already heard grumblings
about it on the order of "Only in a movie could a beautiful
Vegas hooker fall for a smelly drunk"). I would hope that
even those who might be repelled by the subject matter and the
occasional harshness (there's an extremely painful gang-rape
sequence) would respond, like Ben and Sera, to the odd and flickering
emotions that the situation stirs up in them. We know that Ben
is as good as dead, and that Sera isn't going to "save"
him in the conventional sense. To be blunt, you have to make
a certain leap and, like Sera, agree with Ben that his chosen
course is the right one for him. This is a leap of imagination,
and is not the same thing as justifying actual suicide. If you
stand outside the movie for two hours pouting in disapproval,
Leaving Las Vegas is going to be a very cold and unsatisfying
experience. If you let it take you where it's going, it's one
of the most powerful rides in years.
Seth and
Richie Gekko (George Cl ooney and Quentin Tarantino), the
homicidal brothers in From Dusk Till Dawn, kidnap an innocent
family and cross over to Mexico, where they stop at a truckers'
dive called the Titty Twister and go to war with dozens of very
persistent vampires. The movie, which was written by Tarantino
and directed and edited at the speed of light by Robert Rodriguez,
wears its violence and political incorrectness like a big red
S on its chest. The S isn't for Superman; it's for splatter.
Even before the vampires show up halfway through the movie, people
are blown away or burned, or get holes shot through them. It's
a cyclotron synthesis of Natural
Born Killers, Of Mice and Men, Near Dark,
Dead Alive -- hell, every horror movie with Dead
in its title -- plus the usual Tarantino touches: the Big Kahuna
burgers from Pulp
Fiction; "Okay, ramblers, let's get ramblin'"
from Reservoir
Dogs; George Clooney's head-shake and "Come again?"
cribbed from Christopher Walken in True
Romance (how come Walken isn't in this?). From Dusk
Till Dawn is junk every second of the way, but it's the freewheeling,
drive-in type of junk that Tarantino and Rodriguez love so much,
and the movie's relentless crappy retro-ness has great charm.
Are these guys ever going to grow up? I hope not. In From
Dusk Till Dawn, Sam Raimi meets John Woo in B-movie heaven,
which for more serious moviegoers may be a form of hell. Let
'em stay home and rent Jefferson in Paris. The moment
when George Clooney asks fallen preacher Harvey Keitel whether
he wants to be "a faithless minister or a mean motherfuckin'
servant of God" is why some of us keep going to the movies.
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