As a friend of mine once point out, we tend to think of Nicholas Cage as basically playing Nicholas Cage any time we see him in anything. It doesn’t matter what the name of the character is. We think of him as “Nicholas Cage”. Heck, his next movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, actually has him playing himself. His career is so eclectic, odd, and full of strange choices the actor says he does not in the slightest regret simply because he loves to work, about the only thing we can really say about Nicholas Cage is no matter how good or bad the movie is, he’ll turn in something unique, look like he’s having fun, and there’s a good chance it’ll be weird.
It’s really easy to forget he won an Oscar for a more straightforward movie, namely 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, a movie I decided to check out in light of his new one hitting theaters soon.
Ben Sanderson (Cage) is a talented Hollywood screenwriter but also a big time alcoholic, frequently appearing in public drunk and making an ass out of himself. He’s fired from his job and decides the only thing to do is, rather than try to get himself cleaned up or something, is to take whatever money he has left and drive out to Vegas where he will check into a motel and then drink himself to death. He cannot and will not be deterred from this plan. Once in town, he nearly runs over a prostitute named Sera (Elisabeth Shue), but he later hires her to keep him company. He has little to no interest in anything other than her company, and as she is having problems with her pimp Yuri (Julian Sands) and something about Ben catches Sera’s attention, she takes him up on the offer.
Ben’s only condition is that he is there to drink himself to death, and he will not tolerate any talk from her to try and change his mind. She agrees to that, but it turns out to be a very hard thing as Sera starts to develop what perhaps starts as sympathy for the downtrodden Ben. Sure, he’s a drunk, but he’s a self-aware drunk, warning her early on when he’s still just amusing that he can and will do some horrible things as he drinks his life away. Can these two hold it together long enough until the end comes in one form or another?
Credit where it’s due: Cage is fantastic in this. Arguably, Ben is a much more static character, but Cage’s general hangdog expression and overall weirdness actually works well for a perpetual drunk character like Ben. He knows he’s not a good guy in many ways, and there is a core of loneliness to the character as one of the few personal possessions he still seems to hold onto is a photograph of a wife and son that aren’t part of his life anymore. Sure, Cage may come across as over-the-top at times, and he’s actually generally known for that, but here it works.
However, as I watched the movie, I thought it was really more of a showcase for Shue’s Sera. She’s the only who seems to have something of a character arc as she goes from somewhat apathetic towards Ben to actually caring enough to ask him to see a doctor (not what he wants to hear). Ben is off somewhere forever getting sloshed while Sera has to actually do her job and try to maintain some level of dignity while doing so. Yeah, some of the things that happen to her are somewhat predictable for a prostitute in a movie like this, but Shue earned an Oscar nomination of her own for this, and she deserved it just as much as Cage earned his, even if the fact she lost to Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking was probably the right call. But in the end, this was a powerful movie about a lonely man trying to end his life slowly while a woman learned to maybe move beyond her own problems as a result of seeing someone fall far further than she would ever want to, and the fact is that she was his only real company in a world that never really understood him.
Grade: A
0 Comments