Leaving Las Vegas

by Jerry Roberts
June 6, 2004

"Leaving Las Vegas" has the qualities of a sad, tender love song, the sort that would usually accompany the last call. It contains the qualities of all great character studies in that it allows us to follow them into their lives and doesn't manipulate them by the gimmicks of a plot.

It is a great temptation on the part of most screenwriters to make excuses for their characters. The idiotic notion is that characters who are spiraling into their own personal Hell better have a darn good reason for the trip and they better have a safety net when they get to the bottom. “Leaving Las Vegas” is a movie that avoids that useless theory, it’s a sad love song about two souls who don’t meet on the way into a personal spiral but are looking up at the world from rock bottom. They have individual reasons for doing so but it’s not the point and the movie is a portrait of how their hopeless lives intersect if only for a brief time.

The movie stars Nicholas Cage and Elisabeth Shue as two lonely souls who meet in the moment when the downhill paths of their lives no longer contain handrails. He is Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic who has filled his life with so much alcohol that it has pushed everyone else out and with no human contacts and no job left he exiles himself to Las Vegas to drink himself into the grave.

If there are 9 levels of personal Hell then as the movie opens we are meeting him somewhere around level 4. His friends have mostly abandoned him and those that he still contacts are little more than a source of funds (which they do just to get rid of him). The reactions from those around him are of concern but there is a tone in their approach to Ben that suggests that they know that he is beyond help. His regular bartender says “If you could see what I see, you wouldn’t be doing this to yourself”. We sense that just under the swaggering and slurred speech that this body once occupied a charming and confident man. When he is fired, his boss isn’t angry but pities him as he sadly hands him a severance check and assures him “We really enjoyed having you around here Ben . . . but you understand”

Long ago, in better times he had a wife and a son. They have abandoned him and there are large gaps in Ben’s memory and he can’t remember if he started drinking because she left or if she left because of his drinking. In his apartment he burns all of his belongings and the state of the home suggests that the wife and son fled in a hurry. We never learn much about them and our only glimpse is in a photograph that he flings into the fire.

Like a hopeless traveler he wanders into the desert to die. No one knows him there, no one is fed up with him there and the anonymity of the hotel room leaves him alone with his exile. In this wasteland he meets Sera, a streetwalker who’s life has leveled down into a series of nightly encounters in hotel rooms. She doesn’t like him at first (if in fact anyone does) but a relationship develops between them based on mutual acceptance rather than tired platitudes. The closest thing to a Meet-Cute for this movie is that he runs a red light and nearly hits her with his car.

To understand how brilliantly the character of Ben Sanderson is written you have to see how it would have been handled in lesser hands. In the hands of a lesser screenwriter, Ben would have been seen as some kind of wounded saint and the movie wouldn’t follow him to collapse but would follow him to a recovery*. Life doesn’t always work like that but the movies always tend to see addicts as nice people who will inevitably seek help. Addiction by it’s very nature doesn’t have a light switch and it can’t be turned off, it’s a long and painful process that many never seek. It is easier for Ben to seek booze than it is to seek recovery.

He has moments when the haze of booze offers a mixed swirl of reality and fantasy. One brilliant moment happens just after he arrives in Vegas at motel with a red sign that reads: "The Whole Year Inn". Sleepy-eyed he gazes at the sign and to him it reads: "The Hole You're In".

The key to Ben’s character is that he is a drunk, he doesn’t want help and he fully intends carrying out his mission to slowly but surely drink himself to death. Why? Because on the path between recovery and death, death seems closer.

The movie never provides him with an easy answer. Also it never makes the mistake of supplying him a way out of his problem with the help of a good woman. He meets and falls in love with Sera but their relationship is build out of mutual acceptance. “You can never, ever ask me to stop drinking” he tells her “I know” she says.

If the early scenes show the last remnants of Ben’s severed ties with friends and colleagues then we see even less of how Sera has fallen into her sordid profession. Instead we play witness to her exploitive and often humiliating encounters with clients night after night. Why does she do this? An early scene suggests that she does it out of fear from her pimp (Julian Sands) who beats her when she brings home only a few dollars (it frightens him because he is in debt with the mob).

After he is killed Sera is on her own and continues to walk the streets in order to pay the bills. Why? Because It’s obvious that she lacks the skills to do anything else that would reasonably support her and turning tricks brings in enough money to keep a roof over her head.

The movie returns occasionally to a curious conversation that she is having with someone that is offscreen (we never see or hear from that person). Sitting on a couch she bares her soul about the ugly details of her job and later her relationship with Ben. These passages can be interpreted many ways but I think these are her inner monologues as she tries to reason out why she puts herself through the rigors of her job and why she sticks with a hopeless cause like Ben. They also help us understand the nastier sides of her nightly encounters without having to actually witness them.

These two hopeless cases meet in the barren wasteland of Las Vegas. They fall in love but it’s not a romance, it’s an attachment based on mutual tolerance. It’s important to see how others respond to them (most of the people they meet are asking them to leave) so that we can see why they connect to each other. In the wilderness of their loneliness, a tender bond developes not based on sex or phony love story trappings. The movie sees them as they really are and follows them as their personalities dictate. But what makes Sera care about this hopeless cause? I think it’s because he approaches her differently than anyone else. He isn’t interested in sex, he doesn’t throw her out and in several boozy hazes calls her “my angel”.

What makes “Leaving Las Vegas” so intriguing that it doesn’t tell us how to feel. We see the characters in the stages of self-destruction but the movie never gives them a reason for doing so. Why would a man drink himself to death? Why would a woman engage in sexual encounters with strangers? It helps to understand that there are people in life who do things like this for no particular reason (though the movies rarely think so). It is clear that both Ben and Sera have found themselves as the gum on the bottom of society’s shoe but Figgis never supplies them with a reason for getting there. Ben and Sera are wounded people who have found solice in their mutual acceptance of one another and “Leaving Las Vegas” asks us to do the same.
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* If you want to see stories about recovery, I would recommend two great movies: Michael Keaton in “Clean and Sober” and Meg Ryan in “When a Man Loves a Woman”.