Atlantic City: 1980, dir. Louis Malle. Seen on DVD (Jan 2).
For some bizarre reason, I had Atlantic City mixed up with Nashville in my head, and it took me a minute during the credits sequence to realize that this was a Louis Malle movie, not Robert Altman. I know, sometimes I feel like I’m not worthy to be a film geek.
Atlantic City is an odd and interesting little movie, which almost got lost between the other movies I saw last weekend, which were bigger and flashier and sillier and funnier.
For example, it is odd to see Susan Sarandon so young, and Burt Lancaster so old (although I’d recognized him in Local Hero when I saw it last year, so it wasn’t as surprising to me as it was to my boyfriend).
Atlantic City is about the kinds of people who live in, natch, Atlantic City, who they are and how they act and why they’re living in a town that most people visit briefly. The movie paints a nice little miniature of these character’s lives within a storyline where they all entwine. Susan Sarandon’s character, Sally, is an ambitious young woman, stuck working in an oyster bar, and saddled with a criminal husband (who’s shacked up with Sally’s sister, who’s having his baby). She wants to learn how to be a dealer so she can work in Monte Carlo. She lives next door to Lou, Burt Lancaster’s character, a former small-time hood who is pathologically eager to appear more important in the world of crime. Leo is taking care of Grace, who showed up in Atlantic City in the Forties to enter a Betty Grable look-alike contest and never left.
Specific scenes in Atlantic City are better than the movie as a whole. I loved the opening scene with Sally and the lemons, and Lou peeping at her. I also liked the scenes with Grace and Chrissie, Sally’s pregnant sister. I liked seeing Wallace Shawn briefly as a waiter (Malle directed this right before My Dinner with Andre, in which Shawn features prominently).
While the movie is set in Atlantic City (of course), there are a surprising number of French moments, not all of which are related to Sally’s desire to move to France. This should not be surprising, considering that the director is French, but it adds an odd European air to what should be a very American movie. Because Atlantic City is so beautifully shot, the city itself never looks quite as grungy, or poverty-stricken, or dangerous as it occasionally should. Even the ratty apartments look fairly nice.
But then Atlantic City is a movie about unrealized dreams, past and future, and so perhaps the movie itself should have a surrealistic postcard-ish look, with the rough and grimy edges smoothed a little bit. Perhaps that mix of American setting and European filmmaking contributes to the overall unusual mood of the film, which keeps it from dating too much (except for Susan Sarandon’s hair).
The movie seemed to take slightly longer than necessary to end; I thought it would have ended about 20 minutes before it did. But I liked the ending, so that was all right.
Atlantic City isn’t a movie I feel I need to see again anytime soon, but it was an absorbing and different sort of movie, a good change of pace.