Atlantic City Reviews

Louis Malle’s camera fills his tableaus with all sorts of eccentric details in this sweet, modest romance about two desperate people looking for a lifeline. We have Burt Lancaster bringing his history of tough guys to an aging gangster romancing Susan Sarandon’s waitress with a shady past in a city that’s crumbling around them. The film’s hypnotic strangeness provides a ripe environment for these actors to demonstrate their prodigious gifts.

Aging gangster Lou (Lancaster) works for a widow named Grace (Kate Reid) in a building destined for demolition. Across the way lives an oyster-bar waitress (Sarandon) that Lou is erotically obsessed with. Lou claims he was once a contemporary of Bugsy Siegel but now runs a low-level gambling racket when not running errands, occasionally sexual, for Grace. Grace knew him way back when and found herself stranded in this no man’s land in 40s when she traveled here for a Betty Grable lookalike contest.

We haven’t even gotten into the background and tortured past of Sally, Sarandon’s waitress. Malle’s drafted a cast of colorful characters that could scan as clearly fictional creations yet there’s a grounded sense of truth to them. We’ve all seen those former glamour girl types that refused to let their glory go and venturing into aging female impersonator territory. Or the man obsessed with former glories and their own fabricated self-mythology.

These characters are layered and complex despite their initial scanning as fictional creations. They eventually reveal parts of themselves that complicate our initial reading of them and their circumstances. We don’t just believe that these people are real but that their circumstances are founded in truth. How many stories about recluses and eccentrics can point towards orientating these people as founded in truth?

Into this decaying world come Sally’s former husband and younger sister who disrupt the life she’s trying to engineer for herself. Her husband was a criminal that seduced her younger sister and ran away together. They show back up on her doorstep pregnant and with nowhere else to go. Sally and Lou’s eventual meeting is one of lonely people trying to amount to something.

Sally’s former husband also brought along drugs to sell while hiding out, but he gets killed, Lou winds up with them, Grace and Sally’s sister become confidants, and Lou becomes Sally’s white knight. Atlantic City doesn’t reinvent the wheel but presents a pleasing structure to simply enjoy these characters and the mood. Lou’s remaking of his own past and the scenario that has fallen into his lap are an opportunity for him to live up to his own mythologized hype while Sally recognizes this and doesn’t judge him for it.

Instead, Sally recognizes that she has no present and a shaky future. There’s a world-weary center to her character that all the nudity cannot overshadow, almost despite the occasional gratuitous nature of Sarandon’s breast baring. There’s a sweetness to how she knows she needs help and knows that Lou is offering it for complicated reasons, and how this a chance for something to happen. What that something is remains particularly ill-defined, but with a purpose, until the final act.

Atlantic City retains its human element throughout never giving over to judging any of these characters. It merely exists with them and spends time watching them. It all ends in a way that feels predestinated. What a lovely, strange little film this is.