DEAD DRUNK

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

IN ITS OPENING MOMENTS LEAVING Las Vegas establishes the fact that Ben (Nicolas Cage) quite self-consciously intends to drink himself to death on a maniacally accelerated program. What better place to do so than the title city, world capital of self-loathing?

Soon after arriving there he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a masochist who is perhaps not quite as smart and tough as she thinks she is, and thus obviously in line for a painful comeuppance. What could be more appealing to her than a relationship with the visibly doomed Ben?

So she invites him to move in with her--no sex, please, we're preoccupied--and the audience is invited to watch their downward spiral. We're not talking high, morally instructive tragedy here, just a hard lesson in postmodernist outlawry and its sad little anarchies. Writer-director Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs) places a few opportunities to arrest their course along this pair's path, but Ben and Sera don't notice them, and he refuses to exploit them for dramatic purposes or even for ironic effect.

Figgis is a refusenik in every way. Even the neon glitz of his milieu, visual catnip to most directors, is muted. His Las Vegas is mostly low-wattage motel rooms and morning-after grayness. Cage, that most daring of actors, practically cha-chas through the gloom, high on the freedom that the loss of all amour propre bestows. Shue's character hasn't yet reached that heady state. She's engaged in a complex struggle between self-awareness and self-destruction. One has only the smallest hope for her. And none at all for the commercial fate of a movie that may be just a bit too pleased with its own artful bleakness.