Leaving Las Vegas Dead Nan Walking Our reviewer illuminates the difference between kitsch and art while judging the movie made of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking both brilliant and disturbing
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva DEATH TRIPS 'Leaving Las Vegas' & 'Dead Man Walking' In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage plays Ben, a Hollywood scriptwriter who, upon being discharged for drunkenness, uses his...
...Contrast Ben with the Consul in Malcolm Lowry's novel, Under the Volcano...
...Can the killing contraptions of the state be, in some cases, the gateways to salvation...
...The job loss was just a symptom, not a cause, and the same goes for the hero's shattered marriage...
...I didn't mind the lack of clearly specified motivation for the suicide...
...Susan Sarandon's art has become Tolstoyan in its directness and clarity, its absolute freedom from technical fuss...
...after all, maybe such plunges into the abyss are, finally, beyond rational explanations...
...Robbins and his colleagues refuse to dwell in the Country of the Righteous...
...By murdering his victims, Poncelet has acted with a monstrousness that the state will never visit on him, for it is his atrocity that aggressively inaugurates the sequence of force...
...More power to her on both counts...
...It made nearly a clean sweep of the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics awards...
...Nor should it expect any explanation or suggestion of what drives Ben to self-destruction...
...This took moral and aesthetic guts...
...The camera is always on the right face at any given moment...
...But I don't think it is the visual in self-destruction or even the fine acting of Cage and Shue that won the allegiance of the critics...
...Kitsch reassures...
...This idea needn't detain Helen Prejean...
...acute wit, a capacity for love and compassion, an artist's sensibility...
...In this film, process is all...
...Just as we're about to get misty-eyed over the convict's fate, Tim Robbins dries our eyes...
...Now they live in the Country of the Wronged and Prejean must be regarded as an enemy because she continues to be Poncelet's spiritual adviser...
...But Leaving Las Vegas is just kitsch for romantic intellectuals...
...But, as acted, the characterizations couldn't be better...
...But, to some of us watching this movie, the implications of Mathew Poncelet's spiritual fate vis-a-vis his physical fate are quite disturbing...
...the dreamy, lounge-lizard songs on the soundtrack crooned by Sting...
...We fall to death with the hero, and if you don't like the sensation of descent, stay away...
...The good, clean prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold Sera cossets our hero through his descent, but she's got lots of help from director Figgis...
...Way too much help...
...When the rapist-murderer, Mathew Poncelet, goes to the execution chamber and faces the parents of the young couple he helped slaughter, he feels, possibly for the first time in his life, the weight of his own humanity and its connection with all humanity...
...Others will ask why the director reveals the horror of the crime just when such horror is beside the point if we are truly opposed to capital punishment...
...The dialogue is flavorsome, often acute, yet Poncelet's character isn't truly sounded...
...Not of a truly good movie...
...Would Sister Helen's probings and promptings have succeeded if the murderer's sentence had been commuted...
...This movie is an outcry against a deep-seated human urge to enforce closure with death...
...The execution completes the sequence, but, watching it, a yearning wells up in the viewer's breast...
...On the basis of what the movie shows me, I don't think so...
...Far from being "hooked on liberty," he seemed programmed...
...Some will say that by cutting back and forth between murders and execution, Robbins is equating the two and accusing the state of being a murderer...
...The alternative life, the goodness that might have been, is harrowingly on view in the final moments of the remarkable Tim Robbins film, Dead Man Walking...
...Lots of incidents occur but nothing even slightly deflects the trajectory of the liquid suicide...
...Poncelet is a composite of two murderers described in the account by Sister Helen Prejean of her spiritual advisory of prisoners on Louisiana's death row...
...But Poncelet's evil has redefined their spiritual geography...
...Up to this point, Robbins has given us glimpses of the rape-murder, confusedly envisioned by Sister Helen as she tries to reconcile Mathew's version of what happened (in which he is innocent) with what the law says he did...
...refugee, the prostitute Sera (Elisabeth Shue), gladly agrees to keep him company, free of charge, during his last days...
...It is Death Lite...
...So the heart of this movie resides in the joshing, badgering, prevaricating, and pleading confrontations between nun and murderer...
...This movie could have portrayed the parents as hate-twisted bigots, but no, their grief is given its due, and the moviemakers avoid the smugness that so many anti-capital-punishment campaigners exude...
...Romantics are always at least a little bit in love with death, and many great romantic works of art (Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde) are infused with the attraction to death...
...This character exists on screen only to drink and die...
...Film critics are romantics...
...We may be with Ben on a death trip, but it is a cosy, bumpless ride...
...Would Mathew Poncelet have confronted his own evil absent the imminence of his own demise...
...The meaning of the Poncelet-Prejean encounters-the need to cut through self-deceit and corroding hate to win salvation-is extended by the scenes in which Sister Helen visits the parents of the victims...
...Just before receiving the lethal injection, this racist, skinny brute, sporting a Wayne Newton pompadour and a Mephisto goatee, becomes a soul narrowly wrenched out of hell...
...They have to be, for only romantics can stand looking at so much dreck in search of the rare gem...
...Can't the sequence end differently...
...And here is a disturbing thought this movie gave me...
...Art disturbs...
...Mike Figgis, the writer-director, has always been good at evoking dreamy and/or doomful states of mind (Internal Affairs, Stormy Monday), so he's in his element here...
...In the latter we see not only the drunken mess but what is buried under the mess...
...She's not only trying to comfort them and educate herself by being the sounding board for their grief...
...and it is this consul that Lowry never loses sight of...
...In ongoing punishment and ongoing redemption rather than poison coursing through the veins and the light dimming in the eyes...
...As written, these scenes are so good that I wish they were better...
...Though the character of Sister Helen is better limned, some flashbacks to her childhood contribute only psychological fuzz...
...At the end, Sera sums up their relationship: "I accepted him for what he was, and I didn't expect him to change...
...But what alienated and eventually bored me was that there was no trace of that part of Ben that wasn't an alcoholic, no indication of that part of him that had nothing to do with booze...
...Now, just as he's executed, we see what really happened and it's horrible...
...Within the quotidian man who degrades himself with rum and tequila is an alternative consul who might have returned his wife's love and won the respect of his half-brother...
...Another L.A...
...But is this movie a great romantic work of art...
...Too much to ask of a movie...
...Then, did capital punishment, as well as Sister Helen, save Poncelet's soul...
...Why is Robbins giving ammunition to the enemy...
...Leaving Las Vegas gives you a death trip for the price of your ticket and then returns you to your own life where you can shake your head in admiration at "bold, more adventurous people, those hooked on liberty and doing their own destruction" (critic David Thomson...
...the slow-motion lyricism of much of the staging, including an underwater shot of Cage in a swimming pool where he belts down a bottle of scotch while floating in aqua blue-all these devices soothe the hero's passing as much as Elisabeth Shue's big milkmaid's body does...
...The lush, warm photography that captures the pink evening skies over Nevada...
...Sean Penn's performance as Poncelet is like an insidious tune you find yourself humming in unguarded moments...
...As presented on screen (I haven't read the book), Prejean's Christianity is both radical and traditional, radical in so far as it is traditional...
...But here is how I read the scene...
...She also tries to get murderers to confront their own evil because that is another right thing to do...
...the equally soothing shadows of the motel rooms where Ben and Sera cuddle, guzzle, and mutter pseudo-profundities...
...There was once a sane road not taken, and we can dimly discern the happy land where it might have led...
...However, also believing that a murderer is damned unless he repents, Sister Helen must get Mathew to face, acknowledge, repent his evil, and that's even more difficult than staying the hand of the state...
...Believing that every person is a soul enveloped by flesh, she regards capital punishment as a usurpation of God's prerogative...
...In war, the killing of soldiers by soldiers in the heat of combat is obviously not the same thing as the execution of helpless prisoners, but both are part of the hellishness of war...
...Robbins is certainly showing both murder and execution as parts of a chain of violent acts...
...She works against capital punishment because she believes this is the right thing to do...
...They'll be accused of it anyway, sooner or later, and the climactic sequence- Poncelet's execution-may become the crux of the accusations...
...The audience better not expect him to change, either...
...And they pamper our own sensibilities as well...
...Richard Alleva DEATH TRIPS 'Leaving Las Vegas' & 'Dead Man Walking' In Leaving Las Vegas, Nicholas Cage plays Ben, a Hollywood scriptwriter who, upon being discharged for drunkenness, uses his severance pay to drink himself to death in the city of neon and quickie marriages...
...But to see two acts as part of a chain is not necessarily to equate them...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 4
