Low life
Miserable sods
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas asked to see a film recently by the powers that be at The Spectator called Leaving Las Vegas, which I'm sure many of you will know about by now. It is about a mess of a man who decides to go to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. It is a stupid idea and it is not giving anything away to those who haven't seen it to say that he succeeds, although he couldn't have been drinking vodka at the rate he did; it must have been a new Hollywood concoc- tion called Poetic Licence, which is very heady stuff indeed.
He is played by Nicholas Cage who some say is a wonderful actor, but I wondered if he wasn't already a mess and not just play- ing one. He gets involved with a prostitute who is too good to be true, and she is played by an actress who is new to me, Elis- abeth Shue, who will doubtless become Hollywood's latest and newest knockout, taking the place of Kim Basinger and Sharon Stone. At any rate, she is to me just about the best-looking young woman I have seen in an age.
A friend commented that she was miscast, being far too attractive to be a prostitute, but I think that might be nonsense consider- ing a particularly plain one wouldn't do much in the way of business, and, even if a young woman is stunning, it doesn't mean to say that the world is her oyster.
Anyway, the credits start with Nicholas Cage manically pushing a trolley along a supermarket aisle filling it with not one kind of drink but a selection of various types of alcohol, which is something no alcoholic would do. He then goes on throughout the film behaving like a mad slob — even drunks have their sober and compos mentis lulls — drinking vast quanti- ties of vodka straight out of the bottle. It is a known medical fact that one bottle of spirits drunk straight down is a lethal dose.
I pick on these images in the film because there is not one single moment of reality the entire length of it, and even the character played by Elisabeth Shue is so goddam nice, sweet, kind, understanding and beautiful that she could drive anybody to sobriety for at least an hour or two.
In the end he dies while they are making love — she on top of him, of course, now that all missionaries have been ordered by Hollywood to be transformed into nuns. I couldn't even see the point in choosing Las Vegas for a place to die, any more than I would chose the Coach and Horses, although there are no Elisabeth Shues in the Coach — or the Groucho, come to that. A silly film and it will probably later on be weighed down with Oscars.
But what extraordinary ideas people have about not only alcoholics but boozers and heavy drinkers and habitual drinkers, all of whom are different in their ways. I am not quite sure how it is that I first got my reputation as it still seems to stand, although the amount I have drunk in the past six to nine months would hardly drown a kitten, and unlike Nicholas Cage I've cer- tainly never drunk neat vodka out of a bot- tle while cruising alongside a police car. I don't even think that I used to make a par- ticularly loud noise when I was drinking heavily and I was, if anything, famous for falling asleep which has to be better than starting fights.
Mind you, I wouldn't particularly like to see a film about me co-directed by my ex- wives. Their divorce petitions were some- thing out of Walt Disney unless, that is, Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Appren- tice had flooded the place with vodka and not water. Ray Milland in The Last Week- end came nearest to being, the drunk as I know him to be, mainly because he was a miserable sod. So am I. And I shall become more of one the more people distort the business of having one over just the one.
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