Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) is an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who loses his job and decides to end his life by cashing in all his worldly possessions and drinking himself to death in Las Vegas. There he happens to meet Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute who takes a liking to him and ends up falling in love with him.

This is a structurally odd film. We don’t get to really see what made Ben an alcoholic or what made him come to this decision to actually end his life through his favourite destructive vice, not to say that he had any others. However, it does take us from that first liquor run to the final moment where he succeeds at his task, and even though Sera tries her best to make him waver from this path at no point do you believe that he ever will.

Nicolas Cage is an actor who’s infamous for being in bad movies and acting even worse. However, a lot of the people out there who like to write him and his projects off I doubt have ever gone past his last five years of work. Leaving Las Vegas is quite possibly his best film ever. Cage managed to win the Academy Award for Best Actor with this film, and before you all take out your history books and start pointing out all the horrible decisions that the Academy has made over the years as to who should win or be nominated for certain awards I wouldn’t say that this award is undeserving. Cage gives a performance that I doubt he will ever top, and based on his recent track record of campy craziness I doubt he ever will.

The film is unflinching in so many respects. Early on in the film when Sera and Ben decide to start this relationship Ben says that “you can never ask me to stop drinking,” and we, as an audience, all know that everyone does that at the beginning of any relationship. You may see a fault here and there which annoys you but you believe you can get past it, then when you can’t you try to change it and that’s when you worry about it not at the beginning but when you get around to the time when you want to change them. So when we get to that big conflict it’s so well realised that it hurts even more for me as a viewer, I begin to empathise with Sera and hope for something greater than failure.

This film, I feel, was made for people like me; people who’ve fallen in love with the indie romance and is finally being shown the darker side of that romance. It’s given me something to think about what happens when those two damaged quirky characters entwine and how much of an impact do they really have on each other. You leave this movie wondering how Sera changes her life after this experience, and how different Ben’s life would’ve been had he met Sera before this dark time.

Check it out on DVD from Amazon here.

IMDB says 7.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 89%
I say 9.5/10