Latex Movie Review: Leaving Las Vegas

The lovable drunk has been part of Hollywood for the longest time. From Arthur Housman who played the drunk in nearly 100 films during the 1930s including five with Laurel and Hardy to Hal Smith's Otis the Drunk on The Andy Griffith Show to Dudley Moore who played memorable drunks in Arthur and 10. But whenever it came to movies that dealt with the downside of alcoholism, such as The Lost Weekend or Barfly, Hollywood has always felt the need to tack on a happy ending, usually with the lead character vowing to become sober. This is not the case with Leaving Las Vegas, a film which allows the lead character to kill himself with alcohol poisoning by deliberately going on a four week drinking binge. In a 15 minute pre-credit sequence we see the final stages of the downward spiral of alcoholic Ben Sanders ( Nicholas Cage ). Almost always intoxicated he has driven away his last friend and has just lost his job. He confesses to a prostitute that his wife has left him taking his son with her, but cant remember if he began drinking because she left, or if it was his drinking that drove her away. His employer gave him a huge severance check which he decides to use to move out to Las Vegas. His plan is to drink non stop until the alcohol kills him. Upon driving into town he nearly runs over a prostitute named Sera ( Elisabeth Shue ). The next night he seeks her out and pays her $500 to spend a few hours in his room talking and not much else. And in the Hollywood tradition, from just that one meeting Sera falls madly in love with Ben.

If you are expecting some sort of happy ending from this unusual love affair then forget it. Ben lets Sera know from the beginning that he intends to kill himself, and she accepts that. There is no moment in the movie where Ben decides he wants to live and goes to rehab. Sera herself is on her own downward spiral. Her abusive pimp boyfriend is killed by the Russian mob. Without his protection she gets herself raped and beaten by a group of teenage johns. And her prudish landlady has just figured out her profession and has given her one week to move out. When she hooks up with Ben her life does no exactly get better. His drunken escapades gets the pair thrown out of a casino as well as a desert motel, both requesting that they never return. It may seem as if screenwriter and director Mike Figgis has gone overboard with the dark material, but the novel this movie was based on was far more darker with the love story between Ben and Sera barely mentioned. Here Figgis softens the story by making Ben and Sera's romance the focal point of the film. This earned him academy award nominations for best picture as well as acting nominations for Shue and Cage ( which Cage won ). One of the best movies of the '90s it is also quite harrowing to watch. How much you enjoy watching it depends on your tolerance to watching the suffering of the lead characters.

THE SCENE:
Elisabeth Shue simply looks great in this film no matter which outfit she is wearing. But the reason you are watching this movie instead of Adventures in Babysitting is to see her in latex. And at 41 minutes into the film she is wearing a red latex miniskirt with a black bustier top and black leather jacket, an outfit which Nicholas Cage's character finds stunning even though he is falling-down drunk, calling out to her "I love that dress." Shue wears latex again, briefly, at 1 hour, 29 minutes. Here it is a black latex miniskirt combined with a white bustier. Shue also wears a lot of outfits that appear to be latex, but on closer inspection are leather. In the scene where Cage nearly runs her over she is wearing a silver metallic leather miniskirt with a low cut wool top. At 27 minutes she is wearing a black leather miniskirt and a tight black top which she eventually removes revealing he black bra beneath. At 1 hour 16 minutes she is wearing a black leather miniskirt with the black bustier. And at 1 hour 38 minutes she is wearing the black leather miniskirt, black leather jacket and a red bustier.