hoernkeem Review of Atlantic City

Atlantic City (1980)

Atlantic City (1981, Louis Malle) Best picture nominee has good production design but so so plot and script

[5/10 · 18 February 2021]

Atlantic City (1981, Louis Malle) 'Atlantic City' is a crime drama from acclaimed French director Louis Malle. It stars an aging Burt Lancaster alongside a young Susan Sarandon as apartment neighbors in the titular seaside American town. This film was nominated for numerous Academy Awards for the 1981 year although it failed to nab any. The best part about this movie was the time and the location. It felt very 80's (easy to do I suppose being created then) and captured a specific time in Atlantic City's history as it was transitioning from old world mob affiliations to the corporate, family friendly hotel and casino scape that dominates today so it felt on the hairy edge of both decay and rebirth, and those two aspects reside in the two main characters as Burt Lancaster's Lou is old world with murky mob past, although now he is just a low rent numbers runner, and Sarandon's Sally is a young waitress longing to deal blackjack in one of the new casinos and perhaps eventually get all the way to Monte Carlo. The main course of the plot is spurred into action when Sally's estranged husband comes around with stolen drugs looking to score an easy payday. He buddies up to Lou who he thinks can help him. Lou is a conundrum as he longs for the way things were, but he also kind of secretly loathes those days as it is revealed he was never really a mob player. He was kind of a hanger on and existed tangentially to that world living along side but never living up to any of those infamous gangsters of yesteryear. All of a sudden he finds himself in a power position that he has never really been in and further more he stars to woo Sally who he has lusted after from afar. In the early 80's it may have appeared a tad romantic, but in this day and age it is dangerously close to stalker creepy. Things reach a boiling point when some thugs show up looking for their stolen drugs. This story as an outline is actually pretty intriguing, however the character interactions here seem so false and stilted which causes the narrative to become laughable at points. Perhaps this was just how melodrama existed back then as far as acting, but if that's the case acting has come leaps and bounds in 40 years which is probably accurate. Not a bad story, but just something in many of the character interactions felt off for me and it surprises me a bit that this made the short list for best picture of 1981. Eric's Grade: C