LEAVING LAS VEGAS

Leaving Las Vegas

Leaving Las Vegas

Mike Figgis' "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995) is not a love story, although it feels like one, but a story about two desperate people using love as a form of prayer and a last resort against their pain. It is also a sad, trembling portrait of the final stages of alcoholism. Those who found it too extreme were simply lucky enough never to have arrived there themselves.

The movie tells the story of Ben and Sera, played by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. He is a Hollywood agent, she is a prostitute. Although prostitutes can be a cliche in the movies, and those with a good heart even more so, the details of their relationship leave cliches far behind, and the movie becomes the story of these specific characters and exactly who they are. There is also the truth that a man in Ben's condition would be unable to begin any relationship without paying for it.

Ben is in the final stages of an alcoholic meltdown. We watch as he asks a friend in a bar for a loan and is told bluntly: "Don't drink it in here." We sense his loneliness and need in his attempt to pick up a woman in a bar: "I really wish you'd come home with me. You smell great and you look great." We see him being fired from his job, and agreeing that he should be fired, and telling his boss the severance check is too generous. Then he burns all of his possessions, and there is a curling photograph in the fire, which seems to come from a failed marriage. He moves to Las Vegas with the intention of using his severance to drink himself to death.

For Ben, who almost runs her down in a crosswalk, she is literally the last person in his life he will be able to focus on. He loves her with the purity of a love that has no components, except need and gratitude. He doesn't want to have sex with her, doesn't want her for companionship, isn't looking for an "experience." He is simply touched, somewhere inside his suffering where nothing else can reach, that this woman would care for him.

Why does Sera love Ben? The movie leaves that for us to intuit, and the therapy sessions do not explain her feelings, they only show her trying to discover them. There is an ...