Leaving Las Vegas (1995) Review
9/10
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’ll never ask him to stop drinking and he’ll never comment on her work. The 9 is for a film with no plot, no obstacle and no possibility of a different outcome. That sustains a hundred and eleven minutes on nothing but two people agreeing not to change each other. It’s also difficult to watch and doesn’t soften anything. Ben dies, the film says so from the beginning, and the running time is the interval instead of a question.
This film wrecks me, and I think it comes close to perfect. Cage and Shue make two doomed people such good company that I’m grateful for every minute with them and dreading the last one. What keeps it off a 10 for me is the therapy framing device, because Shue’s performance already told me everything those scenes explain.
John O’Brien, who died two weeks after the film rights were sold, wrote the novel it comes from. That’s a fact everybody connected to the production has had to talk about and which isn’t a reading of the film.
The Plan Is Stated Up Front
Ben announces what he’s doing early and unambiguously. There’s 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’ll be alone. That’s 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’s never to comment on her work, and the symmetry 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’s the film’s only conventional dramatic beat and it works because everything else has been withheld.
What she breaks it over is the arrival of somebody else in the apartment. That’s the film introducing a third party for about ten minutes and is the weakest stretch in it. The material is required and the film doesn’t want it either. This stretch is where my attention wanders. The intrusion feels like the film clearing its throat before the ending.
Stating the outcome at the start removes suspense and forces you to find a different engine. The engine here’s companionship. That’s smaller and sufficient. That structure is available to any story about an inevitable end. Illness, execution, a closing business, and the question is never whether but who’s present.
An explicit agreement between two characters is the cheapest possible tension generator. The reader waits for a breach and the breach is your only required plot point. Use the one conventional beat late. A film that’s denied itself every standard move can spend one and it’ll read as enormous.
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 can’t cross a room, and each stage is maintained without regression.
The sweating is the detail nobody mentions and it’s the most consistent thing in the performance. He’s 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’s 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, and it’s the one I’d show anybody who doubts Cage. He’s trying to cash a check, can’t control his hands, and plays the scene as a man politely managing an embarrassment. I wanted to reach through the screen and steady his hand for him, and he never asks me to.
Cage has said he watched footage of himself drinking and studied how the speech degraded. That’s 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 wouldn’t 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’s weakest.
The framing is the one real error, and it’s the first thing I’d remove.
Sera addresses an unseen counselor throughout, explaining herself, and the device supplies interpretation Shue was already delivering without help. Each cut back to that session drains a little of what she built in the scene before. 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, can’t afford them, and she wears them for the rest of the film, and the picture uses a single piece of jewelry to mark everything that happens afterward.
The pool scene is the exception that works. She’s in the water, he’s drinking, and the film allows them about ninety seconds of something like happiness. That’s the only time in a hundred and eleven minutes that either of them isn’t managing a situation. Those ninety seconds in the pool are my favorite moment in the film. It’s the only breath the picture lets me take, and it hurts because it’s over so fast.
A framing device that explains your protagonist is almost always a loss. If the performance or the prose is delivering the interior life, an interpretive layer on top is redundant and flattens it. The test is whether removing the frame loses information. If it only loses explanation, cut it. Write her as practical instead of broken. A character managing a situation is more interesting than one it’s destroying, and the reader supplies the cost. The affection should appear in logistics. A gift, a room, a negotiation about nothing, and the relationship is established without a declaration.
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 look. Super 16 is grainy, handles neon badly in a way that produces bloom and flare, and the images look degraded. That 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’s 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. That means Ben and Sera are moving through a real city that’s 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. That’s the biographical fact that explains the whole approach. He wrote the score as somebody who thinks in phrases and not in cues, and it sits under scenes instead of marking them.
Sting performs three standards on it. That sounds like a commercial decision and isn’t. The songs are all from the period Ben would have grown up with, and they’re placed as things he’d choose and not as comment.
The Mel Gibson Comparison
Figgis was nominated for Best Director and lost to Mel Gibson for Braveheart. That’s the entry this film appears against on that page.
The comparison is worth making in detail. 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 isn’t. That’s the whole mechanism and it works almost every year.
This one still looks backwards to me. Braveheart is big and loud and busy, Figgis made the braver picture with two people in rooms, and I think the Academy rewarded the wrong kind of work that 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’s 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.
Visible effort is rewarded over invisible judgment, in every field. A thousand extras is legible and a decision not to include a scene isn’t. There’s no fix for this, so don’t let it surprise you. The strongest case for a piece of direction is that every element is a choice you can name. Format, score, structure, and what was refused. Refusal is the hardest thing to get credit for. A film that declines an intervention plot, a recovery arc and a framing explanation has made three good decisions nobody can point at.
Should you watch Leaving Las Vegas?
Yes, and once is probably enough. It’s a 9 because every choice Figgis makes, from the grain to the missing backstory to the refused rescue, pulls in the same direction, and Cage and Shue never flinch from where it’s going. The therapy framing is the only thing I’d take out. What’s left is a man who states his intention in the first twenty minutes, a woman who agrees not to ask him to stop, and a hundred and eleven minutes about whether anybody will be in the room.
