Review of Atlantic City (1944) by Benajmin M — 20 Jul 2008

As Lou, an almost prissily natty numbers runner certain that everything - even the ocean - has deteriorated, Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his life in Louis Malle's Canadian-financed film Atlantic City (opening today at the Imperial).

It might be fairer to call the picture a John Guare film, for Malle, best known in Ontario as the director of the unseen Pretty Baby, has entered entirely into his gifted playwright's episodic, jazzy view of the universe - Guare's script for Atlantic City is a commodious comic masterpiece, but it's also a serious fable about the dangers of dreaming.

Everyone in the picture, placed affectionately in an evocative Atlantic City devolving from tasteful faded glory to tasteless refurbished glitter, dreams of getting ahead. (Is Atlantic City a metaphor for the filmmakers' America? Probably.) For the renegade sixties couple Dave (the talented Canadian actor Robert Joy) and Chrissie (Hollis McLaren, the schizo of Outrageous]), the boardwalk is a substitute for the San Francisco of 1966, buried as completely as Atlantis. The pregnant Chrissie wants to take LSD "so we can learn from the baby's wisdom" and Dave, a coke dealer, wants to dump his stash and his past.

Sally (Susan Sarandon), who is both Chrissie's sister and Dave's estranged wife, shovels shrimp behind the counter of a casino oyster bar but meanwhile sees to her dream by attending dealers' school - "I gotta develop my blackjack; I'm gonna deal my way to Europe" - and, total woman that she is, works on improving her body with lemon juice and her soul with a cassette of Bellini's Norma. When she becomes romantically involved with Lou, she has one request: "Teach me stuff." Near Sally's tattered domicile (Sally would use that word, rather than the mundane "apartment") Lou waits gallantly on Grace (Kate Reid), a former beauty queen and mobster's moll reduced by time and Lou's lack of discipline to a state of kitschy caterwaul.

Grace, lying in a bed strewn with ribbons and poodles and other fussy things, bitches at and about Lou; if she were an inanimate object, she'd be a battered pink plastic lawn flamingo, but Lou, a romantic to the tips of his carefully ironed silk ties, cherishes the memory of what she was, while mildy grousing at the monstrous Baby Jane she is.

Lou's most notable characteristic is his tolerance: a man old enough to have "run numbers for the dinosaurs," a man who can say wistfully, "The Atlantic Ocean was something then" - this is not a man apt to be angry long at infirmity, senility or even cruelty.

Lou's dapper, chivalrous, compassionate existence informs the sensibility of Atlantic City with something very much like love; the movie's unpredictably explosive, joke-like tone can be inferred from the fact that Lou's splendid reviviscence is made possible by murder. Atlantic City is a cautionary comedy about a place where dreams can come true. Too true. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.