Movie: Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)
All around Atlantic City billboards promising the city's renaissance pop up, casino's are opening and buildings are being built, renovated or torn down. If the renaissance is not here yet, the promise of one is enough to lure many in search of a better life. Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon) from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is one of those many hopefuls. She is a croupier in training, studying French in the hope that Atlantic City will be her springboard to Monte Carlo. I don't know if any hopeful documentarians arrived around the same time as Sally, but I would imagine they left after seeing this film. In 1976 New Jersey legalsied gambling in an attempt to return Atlantic City - a Prohibition-era hotspot in decline - to its former glory. This film finds the city in the midst of that transition and records incredibly well how it hovers between hope and uncertainty. Sally is of course entirely fictional and so is the story built around her. But the spaces she and the other characters here inhabit feel so unmediated and naturalistic you feel you could almost smell the ocean and the fish markets.
It's hard to capture the atmosphere, mood and authenticity of a place any better than Malle does here. It's quite a shame he didn't get to return to it, say in 1990, to see whether the promises of a renaissance had been fulfilled. Especially because of his skepticism. Many films have been made about how a city's expansion serves to fill the pockets of corrupt developers and politicians, often from the point of view of either these developers and politicians or from the point of view of the journalists, detectives and other moral crusaders trying to expose them. It's much rarer to get the view from the ground, as you do here, of the citizens whose lives will be affected by these plans. And it's a rather cynical view. The same forces that lured Sally to the Atlantic Ocean are also responsible for her potential homelessness in the city; her building may be demolished to make room for a casino. In the film's best scene she finds herself in a hospital to identify her killed husband (who had run away with, and impregnated, her sister), while around her the big honcho's are celebrating another casino opening, completely oblivious to her plight. They do so in a hospital wing named after, and donated by, Frank Sinatra. The revitalisation of Atlantic City is presented here as an elite prestige project, selling an illusion to the working people to make the rich richer.
Unfortunately, the film doesn't entirely work for me. Especially in its second half, the characters' motivations and actions become quite unbelievable, which is only exacerbated by the film's authentic portrayal of the city surrounding them. Especially in its depiction of Lou the film seemed way more interested in calculating the right audience reaction than in creating a credible character. Lou is just the right amount of criminal, just the right amount of delusional and just the right amount of heroic to make him a lovable anti-hero. I can imagine that to audiences in 1980 this didn't matter and that they mostly cared that Low was just the right amount of Burt Lancaster (the only other Lancaster film I've seen is the great Sweet Smell of Success), who in one of his last major roles clearly relates to a character looking for one final chance to be who he always wanted, and pretended, to be.
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