Pushing everything else aside, the only criterion that I ever have of any movie, really, is that it be worth owning and watching multiple times. Hopefully as often as once a year. When I give out those star ratings, the ones that get my highest ratings are simply the ones that I want to purchase. It's as simple as that, really. Working on last week's top ten list, and now watching Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas for perhaps the fifth time, I've realized that this has made me considerably more forgiving and even more appreciative of great but significantly flawed movies.

In his stunning review of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Bill Chambers offers that a film without flaws is a film without a soul. It's a tantalizing, perhaps even profound thought. The philosophy of imperfection, in some way perhaps it's a form of religious humility, an admission of the limitations of man relative to an inerrant God. The imperfect film, as I see it, argues for film as abstraction. That the cinema is simply a shadow of the real world. On a more down-to-earth level, in terms of movie love, it means more when you love an imperfect film. If a film is perfect, then everybody loves it and your affection is quite meaningless. The only problem, as far as I can see, with the Lord of the Rings films is that they are without any real problems and thus soulless. Same with the quite enjoyable Spider-Man 2 and, although I did think Johnny Depp's performance was grossly overpraised, Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not that they are cold, really, but just that they are impersonal. Something for everybody leaves just a little for me.

Leaving Las Vegas is quite an imperfect film. For some reason, at the time of this writing, I have never gotten around to seeing any of Mike Figgis’ other films. It’s really something I ought to apologize for, as Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Time Code, The Loss of Sexual Innocence and even One Night Stand all sound very appetizing and potentially quite challenging. (Aside from Internal Affairs, Leaving Las Vegas is easily Figgis’ best-known work.) I feel quite comfortable, however, in blaming absolutely everything that is wrong with Leaving Las Vegas on him. Let's run down the litany of offenses. First of all, there is a great number of utterly gratuitous celebrity cameos. Yes, that's Steven Weber and Richard Lewis there in the restaurant at the beginning of the film. And there's Valeria Golino in the bar. Since we are in Hollywood we can question if they are playing themselves and Figgis is making some sort of comment through their presences. Nope, they have names different than their own. When we get to Las Vegas we see R. Lee Ermey, Laurie Metcalf and FRENCH STEWART AS A JOHN (to be fair, the film came out a little before "3rd Rock from the Sun"). The capper comes when Figgis casts Lou Rawls as a cab driver.

Speaking of which, we see a cab roof advertisement twice in the film for something called "Red Mullet." This, I have learned, is the name of Figgis’ production company. It’s his face in the ad. Such self-indulgence is probably most at home in a Quentin Tarantino movie, but “Red Mullet” could have been ignored entirely if Figgis had just used it one time. By having it on both cabs, at two completely separate occasions, he seems to be inadvertedly telling us that the same cab was used. Or at least trying to force us into finding out what the hell “Red Mullet” is. When Quentin Tarantino, who again makes Quentin Tarantino movies, showed us a Red Apples billboard in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 it was far from subtle but you still felt that he trusted that you would be able to get the joke.

Strangely, Leaving Las Vegas is fairly impressive as a series of moving photographs. As cinema, it’s often pedestrian and flatly mediocre. There is too much music in the film. The songs seem to comment on the action on the screen, but in a dum-dum sort of way. There is a lot of jazz and R&B on the soundtrack, not bad per se, but the music is never really very melodic and a lot of the time it doesn’t really mesh with the film; it doesn’t take you to that deep REM stage of consciousness that you get from a really good film. Writing this I briefly worried that my musical tastes were too Wonder Bread, but by far the worst song in the film (again repeated constantly) is Sting’s lounge lizard rendition of "My One and Only Love," also a poor entry way to the REM stage of consciousness. So maybe I’m not quite that bad.

The opening credits take a good fifteen minutes to get going; Figgis wants to show us Ben’s (Nicolas Cage) life in L.A. first. When he does get to the credits, he puts them against black on title cards and intercuts them with exposition and helicopter footage of the city. Ugh! I saw this sort of thing in Jeremiah Kipp’s lumpy Near to You and in Mo Ogrodnik’s even lumpier Ripe; it exhibits a lack of confidence on the part of the director. They see the title sequence as a chore that they have to get out of the way instead of a setpiece to have fun with. (While I’ll justify most of the flaws in Leaving Las Vegas, this little detail just pisses me off to no end.)

For the most part, the editing in Leaving Las Vegas is dum-dum stupid. In a bar fight, Figgis will cut to a casino’s electronic billboard at the moment when Ben is hit. There is one sequence late in the movie that really clearly illustrates what I mean when I say that the film is impressive as a series of moving photographs but mediocre as cinema. Sera (Elizabeth Shue) has just come home after being raped anally by a group of frat boys. She goes into the shower and crawls into the fetal position. A tail of blood comes out from between her legs. Jesus! But Figgis constantly cuts back to the rape while she is in the shower. He doesn’t much let the image breathe.

Sometimes Figgis doesn’t really know what to do with his actors. When Ben passes out drunk at the gate of Sera’s living community, her landlady (Laurie Metcalf) is standing inside and rambling needlessly on about how she didn’t let him in because she didn’t know what's going on. The most embarrassing is the scene where Sera is making out with Ben outside of a hotel pool. She takes her breasts out of her swimming suit and lets him drink tequila off of them. Then she suggests that they go inside. Ben gets up but then falls down on a glass table, shattering it. She helps him up and he goes inside. Then the hotel manager comes out with a dustpan and tells them that they can take their loud talking and drinking to their room and check out in the morning. The hotel manager is just standing there with a dustpan until her stage direction. Did she see Sera unleashing the twins? Doesn’t seem like it, otherwise don’t you think she would certainly have mentioned something about it?

The storyline very awkwardly tries to work in some business about Sera’s pimp Yuri owing some money to some tough gangsters. Figgis places Ben in a scene with the gangsters at a roadside gas station as he is filling up his car (?), and then with Yuri at a pawn shop. Yuri is unsuccessful pawning some jewelry; Ben is successful pawning his Rolex. It stretches our credibility that Ben would happen to meet up with these people by chance. It feels like, again, Figgis is trying to get the plot exposition out of the way. And did he have to put gangsters in the picture?

Then there are the plot developments, like the rape scene. I could accept it OK, but it seemed like Figgis was laying it on a little thick when he has Sera’s cab driver notice that she has been raped, demands to know if she has the money to pay for the ride, and then offers that he was just covering his ass, something that she should have thought about doing. Well, that, and he has the landlady abruptly evict her.

Wow. I went on for quite a while there, didn’t I? I want to mention that there are a number of moments where Figgis’ strange little style works very well for the film. The opening shot of Ben whistling as he shops earns a genuine chill when we see that his shopping cart is filled with booze. A sex scene (the only real sex scene in the film) between Yuri and Sera gets under the fingernails. He is really banging her, asking her if she is lonely. She says that she is. All through this, a music box melody plays on the soundtrack. The “Lonely Teardrops” montage is probably over-edited, but it certainly has a charge to it. Also like a little fantasy sequence where Cage imagines the name of his hotel changing from “The Whole Year Inn” to “The Hole You’re In.” For the most part though, there is no denying that Leaving Las Vegas is a mess.

You see that this isn’t nitpicking; there is too much going on here for it to be marginalized as just nitpicking. But do these things make it a weaker film? Not exactly. Not exactly. The imperfections of the film didn’t turn me off when I first saw Leaving Las Vegas, they shocked me. I had been expecting something entirely different than this. Frankly, I was expecting something reverent, much like Leaving Las Vegas’ companion piece that year Dead Man Walking (companion piece in that both are sad love stories, and both were critical darlings that were shut out of the Best Picture Oscar race). Leaving Las Vegas is the concluding chapter of what I have dubbed "1995's Unholy Vegas Trilogy." The three films have tested our preconceptions of shit in growingly complex ways: Showgirls was straight camp, Casino walked the line between genius and insanity, and now Leaving Las Vegas uses its shittiness to break down our defenses before punching us in the stomach. I might even go as far to say that I think Figgis had a very good idea of what he was doing. (Although I haven’t seen his other films, something tells me that they won’t be nearly as amateurish or sloppy as this.)

Reverence, I think, is a far more effective distancing technique than ironic condescension. I'm not sure that I could completely throw the word "gratuitous" at the rape scene and the aftershock. Sera's rape helps to set us up emotionally for her reunion with Ben. We can understand better why she needs him. I think that there are other elements to explore there, I'm not sure if that is the direction that I'll find myself taking this review, but I think that they can be found there. But the rape certainly borders on the gratuitous; while part of me thinks that it can be easily justified, another part is unsure if the film really earned the right to have her raped, particularly since this ain't The Accused and the film doesn't have a good deal to say about the act of rape. But, as I said, a cinematic rape for a reverent purpose is never going to be that effective. One that is just an act of thoughtless unnecessary brutality, well, that gets to the heart of the matter doesn't it?

One of the major obstacles facing Leaving Las Vegas is that it will be pretentious. I mean, look at this material: an alcoholic goes to Las Vegas to kill himself and falls in love with a prostitute. The danger is that we will refer to Ben as "The Alcoholic" and Sera as "The Whore." Figgis is terrified of this, and gets through it by making a shitty movie. If it's a shitty movie it will avoid becoming abstracted Oscar bait. He has us incredulously doubting the structure and the style of the film. As a result the characters never move beyond the stage of human beings. Let me try this on as an analogy. The role of the artist is generally like that of a gardener pruning a rosebush. The gardener wants to make the rose bush look clean, round and neat. He wants to impose his idea of what a rosebush should look like onto the bush. Figgis puts a good deal of work into making sure that the rosebush isn't pruned. He'll water it and give it fertilizer, he'll make sure that it keeps growing and that it gets everything that it needs. When people come to prune his rosebush, he will tear off his clothes and dance naked to distract them. He'll grab their shears and break them. To prune the rosebush is to hate the rosebush, to say that the rosebush should be ashamed of doing that of what is its nature.

Figgis strikes me as a stubborn humanist. A secular God-hating humanist. At times, the film reminded me of Masaccio's Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise. Key to understanding what is wrong with the Adam and Eve myth is in noting that Adam and Eve were not made shamed through eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge made them conscious of their inherent sinfulness. God created them with sin; it was only through eating from the Tree of Knowledge that they realized they were sinners. They are punished for their disgression, but notably their terror and shame at being naked is relieved when God makes them clothing. Christians would probably hate the film. Ben and Sera's solution to their inherent sinfulness is to rely on each other. They reject God and the clothing he gives them, and embrace the nakedness of one another.

There are parallel shower scenes (baptisms) in Leaving Las Vegas, both unsuccessful. After being asked by Sera to try eating some plain rice, Ben takes a shower trying to wash the drunk off of himself. He doesn't; he has snuck a bottle of booze into the shower with him and comes to dinner loaded. After being raped, Sera tries to wash the whore off of herself. She doesn't succeed either; a few scenes later she hits the casino looking for customers. The unsuccessful baptism; they have neither been saved or rescued of their inherent sinfulness (the clothing does not work).

The suggestion is that they'll be redeemed only through each other. Sitting in the shower, sitting on that red tail of blood, Sera does not feel clean as much as simply alone. There is a scene where Ben walks into a pool with a bottle. Under the water, surrounded by an azure abyss, he drinks until Sera comes down also. They kiss. Ben puts his thumb on the neck of the bottle as not to let chlorinated water in, an important detail to note, but for a brief moment at least she successfully replaces his dreams of oblivion with herself. Leaving Las Vegas is a deeply religious film, but it rejects the religiosity inherent in aestheticization (i.e. Raging Bull or Passion of the Christ) and creates a parallel religiosity. It may be among the most romantic films ever made; it elevates love as the ultimate and exclusive form of spiritual fulfillment and defines it in terms divorced from those of God-like beauty. The imperfection of Leaving Las Vegas is a purification of the romanticism, not a distraction.

Elizabeth Shue’s presence is interesting. Strangely, one of the biggest complaints that filmgoers had with the film is that “she’s too beautiful to be a hooker." When asked this in his “Answer Man” column, Roger Ebert, who listed Leaving Las Vegas as one of his Great Movies, was flippant. "Was Paul Newman too good-looking to be a gigolo? Was Demi Moore too good-looking to be a business tycoon? Was Babe too good-looking to be a pig?" While it is strange that viewers would single this out while there are a number of more pressing problems with the film, the complaint is one that is well worth discussing. It is simplistic to say that Leaving Las Vegas is misogynistic. It is utterly insane to say that it’s a male fantasy.

Figgis works very hard to deglamorize Shue. Not just her profession, anal rape and all, but Shue herself. He wets down her hair and shows her peeing and wiping with the bathroom door open. This is probably another half-assed de-aestheticization technique. While it works in a sense, it isn’t taken throughout the whole film; Figgis really just wants to give us a little taste. I think that both Ben and Sera understand that she is too beautiful to be a hooker and the fact has sort of metastasized into their bones. On their first "date," Ben is talking about how he budgets his money for his last few days on earth. "What am I," she offers, "a luxury?" "Yes," he replies. "You're a luxury and your time has just run out." Sera calls herself a whore and Ben calls her a whore, and by whore they mean commodity.

A few of the first words out of her mouth are of her bragging about how good she is at what she does; she can walk into a room and know exactly what the man wants and she can become it. During my most recent viewing of the film, I wondered why Sera continued to streetwalk after her abusive pimp boyfriend was killed. While I certainly couldn't imagine her trying to get a job doing anything else, the question is not one that readily lends itself to snappy answers. I'm not sure that she even understands why she does this. She sees herself as a whore; that is simply who she is. She can't change and if you understand her, you wouldn't ask her to change. The film suggests that her condition is just as inescapable as Ben's.

Two of the most painful sequences in the film are dual failed barroom pick-ups. Ben makes a fool of himself trying to convince Valeria Golino to sleep with him. She rejects him because she can tell that he has been drinking all day. Sera is turned down by R. Lee Ermey, who buys her a drink but is disgusted when he learns that she's a hooker. And of course, both have their own unsuccessful baptisms.

Ben needs a beautiful whore. Not to have sex with her, he's impotent (well, he's drunk all the time) as we can see in the poolside scene and in their first encounter. He wants a woman just for her presence. For her textures and for her smells. But she needs to be larger than life; she needs to really break through his sensory fog. If Sera was anything other than a whore, I'm not sure that Ben would have any use for her. A good whore, as Sera said, will be able to become her man's fantasy. She will also be completely and utterly non-judgmental. It's difficult to make a buck if you're picky about your customers.

Figgis' deglamorization techniques prevent Sera from being two-dimensional. So does Shue's patented pained smile. These acting gimmicks shouldn't work, but they do. With Shue in the role we understand that Sera is ultimately just a girl, just an innocent. When Ben moves in and offers to pay the rent, she tells him, wet hair and all, "You should know that with the rent comes a complimentary blowjob." It's such a desperate moment on her part, it's almost a reflex. Ben just sighs and laughs. What Ben wants of her and needs of her is hardly very noble. If he really did love her, we do think that he would stop drinking. Sera quickly realizes, however, that love means fulfilling all those ignoble needs. She loves him so much that she willingly perpetuates her objectification.

What I think Ben offers Sera, specifically, is a child to take care of. She likes the baby talk; she likes how she has to take care of him and mother him. The image of Ben sucking booze off her nipples is probably among the most vivid depictions of Oedipal sex in the movies. This works for Ben; he needs a woman for a woman's sake. But for Sera, becoming a mother means that she is no longer a whore. One of the most affecting images in the film is of her cooking Ben the rice and telling him that she thinks it's something that he can eat. It's a desperate attempt toward domesticity, but an attempt all the same. She wants Ben to see a doctor, but earlier we have seen her buy Ben a flask to celebrate their moving in together. I don’t think that Sera has grown necessarily, but I also don’t think that these two impulses are inconsistent. I think that they are contradictory elements of a complex personality. As a mother, how could she help but perpetuate his alcoholism (infantilism)? Otherwise, she would be adrift without a purpose. But as a mother how could she but try to cure him of it, as mothers want to protect their young and hopefully help them grow.

The relationship between Ben and Sera is very messy and very sick, but you know, what good is love if it weren’t those things? Light romantic comedies have never done it for me. The messy, aggressively “imperfect” Leaving Las Vegas does. Of what use is love, I must wonder, for the healthy and well-adjusted.