This year's 31 Days of Oscar saw the TCM premiere of the movie Leaving Las Vegas. Not having blogged about it before, I decided to record it. I noticed that it's got an airing on Flix this week, at 10:00 PM on Sept. 29, so I once again made a point of watching it in order to do a blog post on it now.
Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson, who at the start of the movie is buying a bunch of alcohol in order to go on the bender of all benders. He meets one of his friends in Los Angeles, who has obviously seen enough of Ben's antics and is not pleased with Ben accosting him in a business meeting at a restaurant. In a brief flashback, we learn that Ben has just lost his job as an associate producer with one of the Hollywood studios, and is thinking of taking his severance package and getting away to Las Vegas for a while.
Of course, he's really thinking of doing much more than that. He burns many of his possessions and leaves others at the curb in garbage bags before heading out to Vegas. When he gets to Vegas, he's clearly drunk already, that is, if he's even ever sobered up, based on how little he's paying attention to the throng of pedestrians in the Strip area of the city. Among those people is Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute whom Ben eventually runs into again. By sheer coincidence, Ben is alreadly peripherally involved in her story, as she's got a pimp Yuri (Julian Sands) who is being pursued by some gangsters Ben met in the Mojave desert on the way to Vegas.
At any rate, Ben runs into Sera again, and this time offers her $500 to come back to his crappy motel and spend some time with him. They don't have sex, but instead talk and form an odd and uneasy friendship. Ben tells Sera that his plan is to drink himself to death in Las Vegas, and that the one thing she absolutely has to do is not try to get him to stop drinking. She agrees but tells him not to judge her too harshly for being a prostitute.
Sera develops enough of an emotional bond with Ben that she even checks him out of the motel and brings him to her apartment, and both of them go through a lot of hell before their eventual storylines end.
To be honest, there's not much of a plot to Leaving Las Vegas, as it's as much a character study as a fully fleshed-out story. As I was watching, I couldn't help but think of Albert Finney in Under the Volcano. That's an extremely powerful acting performance, but also one that's incredibly difficult to watch. Leaving Las Vegas wasn't quite as difficult to watch, although it's definitely not a movie for everybody. Certainly, it's not your normal Hollywood sanitization and leaving everybody with a happy ending and the possibility of a sequel. And to be honest, I found it a bit difficult to understand why Sera would minister to Ben the way she did.
But if you want to see some good acting, this is definitely the movie to watch, as neither Cage nor Shue seemed to be going over the top. And if you can handle movies that aren't easy, than Leaving Las Vegas is absolutely worth the watch.
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