Reviews by Steven Lewis

LEAVING LAS VEGAS

Great acting stranded by a weak script

Nicholas Cage gives a phenomenal performance and Elisabeth Shue is quite good too, though she looks a little too fresh and clean cut to pass for a Vegas street walker. But the film doesn’t add up to much – a kind of exercise in designer chic nihilism. Too much time is spent in pointless montages and musical interludes, when what I really wanted to see was more interaction, more heartfelt discussion and conversation between these two people. I don’t mind that the film doesn’t provide an “explanation” for Ben’s drinking, or that it refuses him any redemption or rehabilitation. But I didn’t like how it stayed at arm’s length from both Ben and Sera: we never really know what they’re thinking, we just see what they do. For a movie which strips away so much of conventional narrative or character development, that’s pretty unforgivable because without really getting into their skin, we’re left with nothing.

Cage comes to Las Vegas to die. But he could do this alone – so why does he reach out toward Shue’s character? If he’s not looking to be saved (and he makes it clear he’s not), then what exactly does he want from her? On her side of things, why does she even get mixed up with a guy who’s on a suicide trip? What is it about him, what need does he satisfy in her which makes her willing to build a relationship with him even though she knows it can’t last? These are fascinating questions, and ones which might have formed the basis of a wonderful character sketch. But Mike Figgis, the writer and director, was either uninterested in them or simply unable to answer them, so what we get instead are two great performances in search of a reason for being.
-SL

TO DIE FOR

A disappointment

There are some good things here – most notably the performances of Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix – that nevertheless fail to coalesce into a satisfying whole because of the confusion of the central story. Kidman is great as the feather-brained harpy who will stop at nothing to be on television – the absolute narrowness of her world-view to the parameters of what fits onto the TV screen makes her a kind of female counterpart to Jim Carrey’s Cable Guy. But her single-minded devotion to this aim causes her subsequent actions to make little sense: would someone as ambitious as her really stick around in a nowhere New England town (humorously named Little Hope) rather than set out for the big time of New York or Los Angeles? Such a transplant would have given the movie a kick, since it would have set Suzanne’s fundamental cluelessness against the reality of the television industry and how it actually works (to perhaps more humorous results than are displayed here).

But even if you can buy Suzanne remaining in her isolated little hamlet (and it must be said that the setting does allow for some subtler, more understated humor than the scenario drawn above would have), does it make any sense whatsoever for her to get involved with, much less marry, the Matt Dillon character? If we’re really supposed to buy her as someone who thinks about nothing but television and making it in that medium, then what could she possibly see in Dillon, who is barely even familiar with TV? Any explanation would probably be lame, but what’s lamer is the fact that the filmmakers don’t even try to supply one! This leaves you with the sick feeling that it only happens in order to get the plot moving – the worst possible reason for ANYTHING to happen!

This fundamental flaw in plot logic really sinks the movie before it even has time to get going. That’s a shame, because there are SO MANY good things here: Kidman’s performance is wonderfully perky and shallow in all the right ways, and the candy-colored outfits that have been designed for her are a scream just in themselves. The narrative style is inventive, being told in flashback as a series of interviews – “Hard Copy” style, or even “Oprah” style – with the main participants, which in itself forms a meta-critique upon television and its reconstruction of the world (although, curiously, the film keeps dropping in and out of this style, and so waters down its effect). Finally, Phoenix is at once both hilarious and heartbreaking in his portrayal of a trailer park teenager so besotted with Kidman and the sophistication she supposedly represents (the joke’s on him, of course) that he’d literally do anything for her, which is exactly his undoing. Watching him, I kept thinking of Dustin Hoffman’s groundbreaking performance in The Graduate and how it operated on the twin levels of satire and true sympathy all at once. Phoenix, in my opinion, hits the same bulls-eye.

Other enjoyable performances come from Ileana Douglas as Dillon’s sister, wonderfully nasty and sarcastic when discussing Kidman (and then surprisingly touching and vulnerable when you’re least expecting it) and Wayne Knight as the head of the cable station where Suzanne comes to work. If you know Knight only as Newman on TV’s “Seinfeld” and so believe him only capable of wild over-acting, his performance here is a treat: his baffled and understated responses to Suzanne’s dippy ideas and shenanigans are some of the funniest things in the picture.

But in the end it all comes to nothing. The good things in this movie just can’t salvage the fact that the central story has not been worked out with enough rigor. The film spins its wheels beautifully, but it simply has nowhere to go.
-SL