Leaving Las Vegas.

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. Another L.A. refugee, the prostitute Sera (Elisabeth Shue), gladly agrees to keep him company, free of charge, during his last days. Lots of incidents occur but nothing even slightly deflects the trajectory of the liquid suicide. At the end, Sera sums up their relationship: "I accepted him for what he was, and I didn't expect him to change."

The audience better not expect him to change, either. Nor should it expect any explanation or suggestion of what drives Ben to self-destruction. (The job loss was just a symptom, not a cause, and the same goes for the hero's shattered marriage.) In this film, process is all. We fall to death with the hero, and if you don't like the sensation of descent, stay away.

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. 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. (It made nearly a clean sweep of the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics awards.)

Film critics are romantics. They have to be, for only romantics can stand looking at so much dreck in search of the rare gem. 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. 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).

But is this movie a great romantic work of art? 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. The lush, warm photography that captures the pink evening skies over Nevada; the equally soothing shadows of the motel rooms where Ben and Sera cuddle, guzzle, and mutter pseudo-profundities; the dreamy, lounge-lizard songs on the soundtrack crooned by Sting; 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. And they pamper our own sensibilities as well. We may be with Ben on a death trip, but it is a cosy, bumpless ride. It is Death Lite.

I didn't mind the lack of clearly specified motivation for the suicide; after all, maybe such plunges into the abyss are, finally, beyond rational explanations. 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. This character exists on screen only to drink and die. Far from being "hooked on liberty," he seemed programmed. Contrast Ben with the Consul in Malcolm Lowry's novel, Under the Volcano. In the latter we see not only the drunken mess but what is buried under the mess; acute wit, a capacity for love and compassion, an artist's sensibility. 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; and it is this consul that Lowry never loses sight of. There was once a sane road not taken, and we can dimly discern the happy land where it might have led.

Too much to ask of a movie? Not of a truly good movie. But Leaving Las Vegas is just kitsch for romantic intellectuals.