By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Classics. Leaving Las Vegas, And Now Miguel
U. S.: Mike Figgis, 1995 (MGM/20th Century Fox)
“Try to think that love’s not around. Still, it’s uncomfortably near…”
Frank Sinatra, in “Angel Eyes”
Nicolas Cage’s Oscar-winning performance in Leaving Las Vegas as an alcoholic Hollywood agent named Ben Sanderson — who loses his last job and then drinks himself to death in Las Vegas in the arms of a beautiful hooker named Sera (Elisabeth Shue) — is a classic movie potrayal of a lost soul, a man suffused with racking pain and horrible anguish, yet unable to give up the liquor that’s killing him, or the weakness that drives him to it. And this is a classic movie about addiction: its anguish, its sweet sodden joys, its last brutal stop.
The story comes from an almost unbearably truthful novel by John O’Brien — a writer and alcoholic who killed himself two weeks after writer-director Mike Figgis contacted him about this movie — and Figgis(a musician who also composed the score) turns it into a bluesy, jazzy, heart-scarred lament, set in the Las Vegas that Frank Sinatra might be singing of (and in) in songs like “Angel Eyes” and “One for My Baby” — with Nelson Riddle strings, a bare-bones piano and a saxophone wail behind him. The movie, photographed by Declan Quinn, has the lurid glamour of Las Vegas at its most destructively enticing and expensively sleazy , and the shivery pop poetry of life seen through a shot glass.
At its center, Cage and Shue really deliver the goods. Their roles are familiar, almost cliched — the Hollywood drunk and the Vegas hooker — but the way they play them, in the seemingly improvisatory, emotionally shattering style of most Figgis films, makes the movie extraordinary. Cage, alternating at the start between boorish pugnacity, shame-faced wheedling for booze money (from some Hollywood players, whose world he will soon exit), and an odd expression of almost seraphic joy, when he kicks back the booze and sucks death, has rarely been better or as good. (If we get mad at him for movies like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it’s because we know he’s capable of movies like this.)
Among the movie portraits of alcoholism, Cage’s is one of the great ones: as giddy and melancholy as Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, as lost and stumbly and falling-apart as Albert Finney in Under the Volcano, almost as shatteringly funny, euphoric and sadistic as Jason Robards in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and a bit better than that other Hollywood drunk Oscar-winner, urbane Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Cage gives us an indelible image of addiction and its grip and suffering, showing us with lucid clarity the progressive erosion of a charming, bright yet fragile spirit.
Of course, to the average drunk, probably dying nearer the gutter than the Vegas casinos, hotels and motels where Ben hangs out, Ben’s exit with Sera might seem almost an unlikely paradise. That’s true. But there’s no less pain, and he’s no less dead, after the last swig or sip. Neither is any other doomed soul, caught in the neon glare and the cold black velvety night , listening to shivery pop ballads (sung by Sting instead of Sinatra), trying to make love (and failing) and dying, dying, dying.
Extras: Uncut, unrated version not seen in theatres.
U. S.: Joseph Krumgold, 1953 (Milestone)