Leaving Las Vegas (1995) Review

A screenwriter is fired, sells or burns everything he owns, and drives to Las Vegas with a stated intention. He meets a woman working the Strip. They agree two conditions: she will never ask him to stop drinking and he will never comment on her work.

The 9 is for a film with no plot, no obstacle and no possibility of a different outcome, which sustains a hundred and eleven minutes on nothing but two people agreeing not to change each other.

It is also difficult to watch and does not soften anything. Ben dies, the film says so from the beginning, and the running time is the interval instead of a question.

The novel it comes from was written by John O’Brien, who died two weeks after the film rights were sold, which is a fact everybody connected to the production has had to talk about and which is not a reading of the film.

The Plan Is Stated Up Front

Ben announces what he is doing early and unambiguously. There is no ambiguity about the outcome, no intervention plot, and no scene in which anybody plausibly believes he can be stopped.

The film also removes the backstory. Whatever happened to his marriage and his job is delivered in fragments and never assembled, and the picture declines to supply a cause that would make the drinking explicable.

That removes every conventional source of tension and the film has to find another. What it finds is the question of whether he will be alone, which is a considerably smaller question and turns out to be enough.

The device that makes it work is the agreement. Sera accepts the terms, explicitly, in dialogue, and the film’s remaining tension is entirely about whether either of them will break a promise they made knowing what it meant.

She also states her own condition, which the film gives equal weight. He is never to comment on her work, and the symmetry is what makes the arrangement a negotiation between two people instead of one person’s accommodation of another.

When she does break it, once, near the end, it is the film’s only conventional dramatic beat and it lands because everything else has been withheld.

What she breaks it over is the arrival of somebody else in the apartment, which is the film introducing a third party for about ten minutes and is the weakest stretch in it. The material is required and the film does not want it either.

Cage

He reportedly prepared by drinking and recording himself, studied the physical progression, and built a performance around a man whose motor control is failing on a schedule.

The technical work is specific and consistent. The hands go first, then the walk, then the speech, and by the last act he cannot cross a room, and each stage is maintained without regression.

The sweating is the detail nobody mentions and it is the most consistent thing in the performance. He is damp in every scene after the first act, in air conditioning and out of it, and the film never draws attention to it once.

What lifts it above the technique is that Ben is charming. He is funny, self-aware, courteous, and completely without self-pity, and the film needs him to be somebody worth spending time with or the premise is unbearable.

The bank scene is the performance in miniature. He is trying to cash a cheque, cannot control his hands, and plays the whole thing as a man politely managing an embarrassment and not as a tragedy.

Cage has said he watched footage of himself drinking and studied how the speech degraded, which is the kind of preparation that produces either a great performance or an unwatchable one. The difference is whether the actor keeps the character’s dignity, and he does.

Elisabeth Shue

Sera is the harder part and the one the film would not survive getting wrong, and Shue was nominated and lost to Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking.

What she plays is somebody who has made a set of arrangements to survive and has decided this man is one she wants. The performance is practical instead of damaged, and the film’s therapy-session framing device is where it is weakest.

The framing is the one real error. Sera addresses an unseen counsellor throughout, explaining herself, and the device supplies interpretation the performance was delivering without help. Remove those scenes and the film is stronger.

Her best material is domestic. Buying him a hip flask as a gift, arranging a room, negotiating with him about nothing, and the film is at its most affecting when the two of them are simply keeping house.

The earrings are the other object. He buys them, cannot afford them, and she wears them for the rest of the film, and the picture uses a single piece of jewellery to mark everything that happens afterward.

The pool scene is the exception that works. She is in the water, he is drinking, and the film allows them about ninety seconds of something like happiness, which is the only time in a hundred and eleven minutes that either of them is not managing a situation.

Four Million Dollars and Super 16

Figgis shot it in about twenty-eight days on Super 16mm, largely on the Strip without permits, with a small crew and available light.

The format is the film’s texture. Super 16 is grainy, handles neon badly in a specific way that produces bloom and flare, and the images look degraded, which suits a film about physical deterioration.

The daylight material is worse and deliberately so. Las Vegas in the afternoon on that stock is washed out and ugly, and the film puts most of its hardest scenes there and not in the neon.

That is the argument for the constraint. A 35mm production with proper lighting would have produced a cleaner film and a worse one, and the grain is doing work no budget could buy.

Shooting without permits also produces the crowds. The extras on the Strip are largely people who happened to be there, which means Ben and Sera are moving through a real city that is not paying attention to them.

Figgis also wrote the score, which is a jazz-inflected set of pieces with a repeated theme, and the combination of his own music and his own direction gives the film a tonal consistency that a larger production would have negotiated away.

He played trumpet professionally before directing, which is the biographical fact that explains the whole approach. The score is written by somebody who thinks in phrases and not in cues, and it sits under scenes instead of marking them.

Sting performs three standards on it, which sounds like a commercial decision and is not. The songs are all from the period Ben would have grown up with, and they are placed as things he would choose and not as comment.

The Mel Gibson Comparison

Figgis was nominated for Best Director and lost to Mel Gibson for Braveheart, which is the entry this film appears against on that page.

The comparison is worth making precisely. Gibson directed a hundred-million-dollar historical epic with thousands of extras and large-scale battle staging, and Figgis directed four million dollars of two people in rooms.

The Academy has a documented preference for visible effort, and a battle sequence is visible in a way that a lens choice is not. That is the whole mechanism and it operates almost every year.

The five nominees that year were Gibson, Figgis, Chris Noonan for Babe, Michael Radford for Il Postino and Tim Robbins for Dead Man Walking, and four of the five films cost less than a tenth of what the winner did.

What is defensible about the argument is that Figgis’s decisions are all legible on screen. The format, the score, the refusal of a plot, and the absence of an intervention narrative are each a director’s choice and each one is the reason the film works.

Should you watch Leaving Las Vegas?

Yes, and once is probably enough. A man who states his intention in the first twenty minutes, a woman who agrees not to ask him to stop, four million dollars of grainy Super 16 neon, and a hundred and eleven minutes about whether anybody will be in the room.

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