Yes, I can see where you're coming from, which seems to me a common theme in many of your reviews. However I don't think that John Ford in 1952 could have anticipated 21st Century doctrinaire feminist perceptions.
Thirteen years earlier he managed to make a film that treated a woman's desire for dignity as seriously as those of her male counterparts. We can assume that Ford's empathy regressed after he made
Stagecoach or we can just chalk it up to a dynamic in the script that was very typical of the era.
I don't demand that filmmakers from the past be held to modern standards (whatever that would mean), I just acknowledge when their racism or sexism or portrayal of disability or homophobia or whatever makes a story less enjoyable to me as a viewer.
Leaving Las Vegas, 1995
I'm sick, work is sucking the life out of me, and two of the children I've been teaching in person are currently quarantining because they've been exposed to COVID.
So why did I decide to watch a movie about a man dying of alcohol addiction and his complicated, fraught relationship with an abused Vegas sex worker? No idea. You may not be shocked to learn that the film was
kind of intense and
a bit too much for me right now. LOL.
Ben (Nicholas Cage) is a former Hollywood screenwriter in the late stages of alcoholism. He forms an uneasy bond with Sera (Elizabeth Shue), a sex worker living a dangerous life working the strip. The two of them are able to be with each other because they develop a mutual understanding: she won't try to make him stop drinking, he won't try to make her stop working.
Most of the praise for this film has to go to Cage and Shue for their fearless performances. Whatever charm Ben used to possess has long since drowned in a sea of booze, and yet Sera still sees the fragments and unwisely pins hopes on them. Sera has developed a veneer of non-judgement, which is just what Ben needs--someone to look the other way while he drinks in the shower just so that he can calm his jitters enough to put away a basic meal. They are two lost souls who, in a romantic comedy, would save each other. But this is not a romantic comedy.
Mike Figgis's direction sometimes leans toward the melodramatic, especially in the repeated use of slow motion accompanied by somber jazz, but overall I liked the way that the film was shot. When it comes to Ben's withdraw or the humiliations that Sear suffers in her job, Figgis repeatedly walks just the right line between showing enough to help us understand their pain and suffering without showing so much that it feels like exploitation. Whether it's Ben violently experiencing withdraw or a violent, harrowing assault that Sear endures at the hands of a trio of men, Figgis draws the line at empathy. It keeps the intense events feeling real and doesn't force the actors to go to extremes--something that could have tripped the film into self-parody.
The way that the film is shot also makes Vegas itself into a third main character. Ben and Sera live perpetually on the fringe of people who are living much better lives. It made me think a bit of the dynamic in
The Florida Project, where the degree of prosperity and escapism by the characters around them only heighten the plight of the central figures.
This was an emotionally brutal film, but one that I couldn't look away from.