Love, Life, and Leaving Las Vegas

Posted by Dan

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

As we finished up hammering out the final terms of our first #filmswap, Eric asked me a puzzling question - one that was worded with absolute gravitas, austerity, and even a little bit of concern , as if the very shape of my destiny depended on it.

“Do you have the heart to watch Leaving Las Vegas?”

I had to pause for reflection. What did that mean? Did Eric intend this as a challenge, daring me to tackle this Nicolas Cage vehicle like a matador waving around a copy of The Wicker Man on HD-DVD? Or was he  worried about my emotional constitution, like the most beloved of Cage’s paternal figures? (The Family Man? I don’t know, I’ve never seen it). When I asked Eric to elaborate about what he was getting at, all that he left me with was a warning: I would feel uncomfortable. And I did.

But not in the way I thought I would.

To be fair, I thought I had done my homework. I skimmed through the trailer, and figured I was getting a reasonable impression of what I was in for. Loopy Nicolas Cage shuffling down a liquor store aisle in a kind of boozy cha-cha that seems to embody his entire acting style? Check. Elizabeth Shue reminding me that there was, in fact, life after Back To The Future III? Check. A love story that brought two unlikely characters together in a whirlwind of fate? Double-check. I asked myself, “Is there anything in here that I haven’t seen before? What could be missing from this trailer that put me so off the beaten path as to make me feel uncomfortable?”

As it turns out, there was a lot. But it was something more than Nicolas Cage’s weird acting, which, this time out, I actually appreciated almost as much as his stellar work in Adaptation. It was even something beyond watching an actress from my most memorable childhood movies give slow, awkward oral sex to a backing soundtrack of woozy Bourbon Street blues.  Instead, what really threw me for a loop was how it deals with the traditional Hollywood love story of broken people and likeable screw-ups.

Or, rather, how it doesn’t. To elaborate: there seems to be an archetypal plot structure in both classic and contemporary romance films which sees two people, each with their own bag of flaws and emotional scars, come together to heal one another’s wounds and to make the audience sigh with delight. It’s typical in film, and both filmmakers and audiences like it because it works. This is the kind of story I was anticipating, and having seen Cage in romances like It Could Happen To You and City of Angels and come out the other end still breathing, I was totally fine with that prospect. But that isn’t what we get in Leaving Las Vegas. Instead of cooing as Cage’s Ben and Shue’s Sera overcome horrible backstories to find solace in one another, I often found myself scratching my head at the TV.

“Why do these people need each other? Why does Sera choose this schmo out of all the other men she meets? Why does Ben keep drinking and flipping out? Is he even remotely happy with her? Is this Ben’s story, or Sera’s? I don’t see it!”

In trying to deal with these questions, I kept referring back in my mind to what happens in the other romance movies I’ve seen and what, by that blueprint, should happen in Leaving Las Vegas. It was only about halfway through that I began to recognize the futility of such an endeavour. Perhaps it’s not actually our place to truly understand why these characters gravitate toward one another and cling on with such desperation. To be fair, we don’t even really know a whole lot about them – aside from a prologue showing a slice of each one’s daily life, the details of their backstories are only really suggested to us through vague bits of dialogue, the kind of people that surround them, and one particularly memorable scene’s deliberate focus on the cathartic burning of Ben’s earthly possessions. Maybe being so unconventional and even incomprehensible elevates Ben and Sera above being just characters, into something more familiar and human. The audience may not need to understand or to sympathize with motivations, but they should recognize the raw, messy needs of these protagonists. As the film continued, I myself eventually gave up trying to figure out where the plot should or ought to be going and just became a viewer – watching passively as hopes and dreams spiral down the drain along with the prospect of a Hollywood Happy Ending.

This, most of all, is what put me out of my comfort zone. But, like Sera seems to take away from the film, life goes on. Enjoy it while you can, even if you don’t quite understand or rationalize why and how you do it.

Follow Dan on Twitter: @korbermite