Leaving Las Vegas has arrived on 4K Blu-ray and the results are… appropriate. The image — framed in the original 1.85:1 ratio — is often dark, especially in motels and other dingy locales, which rather fits this addiction drama. Otherwise, the image is broadly clean and satisfactory, if not reference quality. But who would expect Leaving Las Vegas to be reference quality? This film is supposed to punch you in the stomach, not dazzle your eyes.
Mike Figgis’s film has never winded me, though, and it never winded Gary Oldman, either. “I enjoyed the cinematic experience of Leaving Las Vegas, but I can’t say I believed a great deal of it,” Gary Oldman told The Movie Show, “because bottom line: you’re not that charming, you stink, and you bleed from your arsehole.”
Oldman was promoting Nil by Mouth, his remarkable 1997 directorial debut. That film, starring Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke, depicts the latest cycle of violence in an underclass family somewhere in southeast London, and it is a contender for the most brutally authentic realist drama ever made.
Leaving Las Vegas, by comparison, is an alcoholic’s fever dream. While Winstone’s character is a drunk wife beater giving it large in his Lewisham pissing ground, Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) is a charming Hollywood insider who, despite a family and a screenwriting career, has surrendered to alcoholism and decided to drink himself to death in Las Vegas, where he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), an attractive prostitute.
This is a blunt, bleak plot, yet Leaving Las Vegas cannot transcend its central relationship, which skews cliched and sentimental. Ben’s romantic prospects are poor, especially with anyone who looks like Sera, so why does she fall so hard for him? Stranger things have happened than a punter turned ‘boyfriend’, but the relationship still has a credibility problem, and the film tries to address narrow-eyed viewers with lines such as, “What are you? Some kind of angel visiting me from one of my drunk fantasies?” Even if you believe it, this is a charmed account of death drinking.
Leaving Las Vegas is best viewed as a weepie melodrama with noirish aspirations rather than as a serious observation of alcoholism. The film is graphic enough to feel at least some weight of Ben’s drinking and Sera’s prostitution, and both actors give memorable performances. The music is strong, too, with Sting’s beautiful jazz standards and Michael McDonald’s powerful rendition of Lonely Teardrops, which charges a travel montage early in the film. “Most depressing film ever”, though? Not a chance.
Get your copy here.
