“I don’t know if I started drinking ‘cause my wife left me or my wife left me ‘cause I started drinking but fuck it anyway.” – Ben Sanderson, Leaving Las Vegas
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Las Vegas is filled to the brim with metaphors; some meaningful, others corny and obvious. Its nickname is “Sin City,” meaning there is nothing to hide about the gritty allure on display, but it’s also a place where people go to shine bright or fade away, often in equal measure. When suicidal ex-screenwriter Ben Sanderson said goodbye to Los Angeles for the seedy glamour of the desert mecca in the mid-1990s, the adage “Where souls go to die” finally found its eternal point of reference for cinephiles. While Martin Scorsese’s Casino and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls showcased the city’s excess, neither captured its haunting depths like Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas. As this searing, doomed romance turns 30 in October 2025, its raw power remains undiminished and a must-see for those experiencing loss, trying to make sense of its devastation, or just looking for solace in a world that offers very little without a price tag attached.
Over three decades, some have considered this unflinching drama an outlier in the canon of revered 1990s indie cinema. Perhaps that’s fitting – its relentless honesty makes it too intense for oversaturation or dissection. While it hasn’t yet earned a Criterion Collection release or significant scholarly attention, its visceral imagery, stark dialogue, and gritty tone continue to resonate, much like the stale scent of liquor and nicotine in the dingy walls of “The Hole You’re In” (or The Whole Year Inn, as Ben drunkenly misreads it). Based on John O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical 1990 novel, later called his “suicide note,” Figgis’s magnum opus dismantles conventional romance tropes, venturing far beyond the familiar.
While often overshadowed in this subgenre by films like Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation eight years later, the movie offers an unforgettable, raw experience, and its unhappy ending and lack of a savior approach to suicide likely proved too much for Clinton-era optimism.
The film’s protagonist is an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who loses his family and his job thanks to the bottle. With nothing left, he cashes out his severance pay and moves to Sin City to drink himself to death. In this bleak descent, he forms an intense bond with Sera (a transcendent Elisabeth Shue), a sex worker who we deep down know will likely claw herself out of her predicament one day, but not before some emotional scars the likes of which many of us hope we never endure. Their relationship becomes a fragile, tragic connection as Ben insists on his imminent self-destruction, a certainty Sera agrees to accept entirely because it’s been a long, long time since she was with someone who wanted to hear her story and not just cum in her face before kicking her off a hotel bed, as she tells an off-screen therapist.
The film’s visual language heightens its intimacy and emotional weight. Cinematographer Declan Quinn, following Figgis’s vision, shot on 16mm film stock, resulting in a grainy, lived-in texture that contrasts starkly with glossy portrayals of Vegas. Figgis and Quinn depict a mid-’90s Vegas that rejects glossy tourist imagery on the celeb-filled Strip for the “Freemont Street Experience,” its debauched downtown neighbor. Instead, their Vegas is garish, fast-moving, and insular, showcasing dingy hotel rooms, seedy casinos – the ones where gambling addicts on fixed incomes can throw their rent away – and a claustrophobic world of shadows like ghosts still searching for meaning long after their dreams never materialized. This visual language mirrors the characters’ inner lives, reflecting the lows they’ve endured and the brief brightness their connection brings amid the neon signs.
Music and editing further shape the film’s jazzy, steamy atmosphere. Figgis himself composed the ambient score, complemented by older songs that evoke the characters’ chaotic emotional landscapes. Editor John Smith employs jarring, rapid-fire cuts to disorient and immerse viewers in Ben’s self-destructive haze. The opening sequence exemplifies this: unbroken shots of Ben’s drunken monologues intertwine with frenetic cuts of his deteriorating life, setting the stage for his ultimate downfall, but not before Sera, his “angel,” “mixes with the liquor” as an “antidote” to allow him to experience love one last time. The film’s formalist techniques extend to its narrative devices. Sera’s voice-over narration on the therapist’s coach provides poignant reflections on her doomed relationship with Ben. This layer of introspection invites viewers to see beyond the surface of their unconventional bond, illuminating humanity within their pain.
Ultimately, the film’s aesthetic choices – its grainy visuals, fragmented editing, and melancholic score – turn Leaving Las Vegas into an unforgettable character study. There is that long-running debate on who played the best screen drunk, and although it looks like Cage was intoxicated the entire time, he revealed in a 2003 episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio that, despite his wish to drink the entire five-week shooting schedule, he only got to “get a real blackout” on camera midway through the movie. Ben and Sera are gambling on the Strip, and after a full bottle of vodka, according to Figgis, Cage’s casino table meltdown with a server was the real deal. “I never drink when I act, but I wanted to incorporate, in some scenes, actual drinking,” he said. “So that scene in the casino when I’m freaking out, I’m really drunk.”
We never get to know what happened in Ben’s life to cause this death wish, but during the blackjack table freakout, he screams, “I’m his father!,” leading the audience to believe his wife left him because he started drinking, as he quotes at the start, and is something Cage later shared was his own interpretation of Ben’s downfall. Figgis’s inventive formalism and commitment to storytelling ensure that this love story between two lost souls lingers long after the credits roll. Backstories sometimes just aren’t important – been there, heard that, got the mental scars to prove it is how many people start to feel after a few too many punches in the gut from life. We get that loud and clear with Ben and Sera, and even during the latter’s monologues with the therapist, we mostly only hear about the bad stuff she has endured. The crux of her problem with Ben is that she has not yet given up on existence and still believes that emotions are something worth celebrating and feeling – Ben wants to destroy feelings slowly with only the pleasure principle remaining before his liver or heart gives out. However, it is hard for a living being to sever their emotions completely, and in one drunken haze after another with Sera, we arrive at the film’s brutal crescendo – Ben does have feelings for her, but not enough to override his wish to fade away. “I’ll tell you, right now. . . . I’m in love with you. But be that as it may, I am not here to force my twisted soul into your life,” he tells her. After Sera insists she wants to be with him, he also reveals, “You haven’t seen the worst of it. These last few days, I’ve been very controlled. But I knock things over and throw up all the time. But right now I feel really good. But that won’t last forever.”
While intoxicated, Ben fools around with another sex worker (a young, pre-Law & Order: SVU Mariska Hargitay), which Sera walks in on after a night of work. He attempts to apologize but she tells him to get out, and he goes back to The Hole You’re Inn to finish his mission. Sera is now alone and adrift. Her former pimp/lover Yuri, played brilliantly by the late, great Julian Sands, is dead long after scamming the wrong people. We experience Sera’s freefall into the worst nightmare of any sex worker – getting into a hotel room with a group of rowdy college-aged, well-off lowlifes. After deciding against the job, they then beat and rape her while they encourage a special needs friend of theirs to have his way with her as well. In an age where such scenes would be condemned as unnecessary, Leaving Las Vegas doesn’t flinch when showing the barbarity of the dark side of bro culture run amok, at a time when there were no “platforms” to highlight such transgressions.
Yet this isn’t necessarily the point of the scene; Sera is also being beaten by life, but she isn’t going to give up yet; there is hope for her even as we see another jock grab her by her genitals and throw her out of the gambling spot Ben lashed out in earlier. A kind taxi driver then sees her beaten and bruised, trying to hide behind sunglasses. “If I was you, I’d leave him. Pretty girl like you, you can get any man you want.” She arrives back home to be told by her landlords that she needs to be out by the end of the week – they see how beaten and traumatized she is, and their own discomfort brings out their inner judgmental cruelty. Ben calls Sera out of the blue, and she goes to his deathbed. They have sex as the melancholic score trumpets Ben’s entry into oblivion. “See how hard you make me, Angel?” he exhales before fading away with a final “wow.”
Even after three decades, Leaving Las Vegas remains a raw and powerful experience for its ability to portray heavy scenes that do not offer the viewer any reprieve or hope whatsoever. It stands as a testament to the power of indie filmmaking to provoke, challenge, and deeply move audiences through bold and unconventional artistry. At a time when viewers were more willing to step outside their comfort zone at the multiplex, the film found success at the American box office. But it’s not shock value or sensationalism – at its core, the film tells the story of two individuals who reject society’s pretenses and its relentless attempts to confine people to rigid molds. Sera is a prostitute who likes what she does – “I mean, it’s amazing. It’s like I’ve- I’ve worked for a really long time and: Boom. I just turn on a dime. I can just become who they want me to be, I walk into that room, [and] I know right away: This is their fantasy. And I become it.” Ben accepts this totally and without judgment, and that is one of the central themes of Figgis’s ethanol-soaked fever dream of a drama. Here are two people not out to change the world with hokey thoughts or ideas for what other people should and shouldn’t do with their lives. The film ends with Sera telling the doctor, “I needed him and I loved him,” after admitting she knew deep down she didn’t have much time with Ben.
This is a film about two people determined to embrace the experience of giving and receiving love, despite every obstacle bent on standing in their way to finding contentment. It’s a journey to be proud of, even when self-destruction cannot always be avoided or overcome. Love is pain, and Sera’s voice-cracking farewell that fades into Ben’s smiling will forever remain etched on celluloid as a poignant reminder of that truth.
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Works Cited
Acuna, Kirsten. “Why Nicolas Cage Was Cast in the Movie That Won Him an Oscar.” Business Insider, 26 Oct. 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/leaving-las-vegas-nicolas-cage-2015-10. Accessed 27 Jan. 2025.
Leaving Las Vegas. Directed by Mike Figgis. United Artists, 1995.
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All images are screenshots from the film discussed.
