Less a lion than shambling tomcat in winter, Burt Lancaster delivers to us in ATLANTIC CITY a truth no less ugly for its familiarity: aging makes fools of us all. It would be wrong to attribute this film's expansive knowingness solely to Lancaster's unsettling creation, but there's an especially sharp eye trained on the deteriorating human body in this late Malle film, and I'm not sure who we should thank for that. Certainly we can assume the ruptured grace of Lou, Lancaster’s character, drew on that slow horror of seeing one’s beauty siphoned off into celluloid yesteryears. After all, who other than an actor has so many opportunities to watch and measure the incremental creepings of mortality? Malle, who would go on to direct another seven films, nevertheless must also have been noticing the shadows of death creeping in. I suspect a wordless connection between these two ageing artists, who knew all too well that a nude lemon wash in a hotel window would draw the worst out of any crumpled would-be alpha male.
And it's significant that Malle begins his film this way, because there's only the barest erotic pull to this act of voyeurism. Sally (Susan Sarandon) looks the image of youthful beauty, but her softly lit body is refracted by the lusting, impotent stare of Lou. The male gaze is made pathetic, capable of seizing onto its favored sex objects but separated from them by age and distance. It's only memory of past patriarchal power that even allows Lou such a transgression anymore. Ownership of the female body is fantasy now, despite their neighborly proximity. There's nothing left to see here. And though Lou will go on to assert his virility in increasingly desperate ways, this is not the drama Malle intends us to follow. Early on, the sight of the collapsing Traymore Hotel clues us in to the fate of Lou's self-willed resurrection. Atlantic City — and ATLANTIC CITY — has no time for the past, not when there's money to be made in the future (a process I’ve witnessed myself, having serendipitously made a romantic trip there myself only a few days ago). Time and capital sweep our dreams briskly aside.
As the verdict solidifies on our annual state of the Woodman address, ATLANTIC CITY seems all the more unlikely for denying us the comforts of silver fox mythology. The film even pretends at first there may be redemption for Lou in contrasting him against the craven Dave Matthews (Robert Joy). Lou's tales of the old days, not yet revealed as falsehoods, have all the glamour of movie star gangsterism. We also metatextually expect a certain amount of mystique from the great Burt Lancaster, exuding charisma even before his plot strand comes to dominate the narrative. This all changes, however, when the loose partnership ends in Dave's murder. Lou can no longer revel in being the surrogate father to the new kid on the block, and so he picks up the reins of their dummy drug business and gains the confidence to begin seducing Sally. His eventual success should be titillating, but instead it ends up further embarrassing a deluded man too lonely to admit his own irrelevance. Brief flickers of attraction between Lou and Sally cannot undo the fundamental mismatch between them. Perhaps the most telling moment comes before Lou has fully conquered Sally, when another peeping Tom session leads him to act out his lust upon an equally aged and pathetic hotel occupant.
ATLANTIC CITY may understand well the power plays of masculinity, but it does not ignore its female characters to shed unflattering light on the male ones. Indeed, Malle locates his tragedy in what becomes of the women these men pick up and let go. Grace, Lou's benefactor and occasional partner, clings to the fantasy of her bygone glory days. She invests so much meaning in being the trophy wife of another slain gangster that the squalor of her current life seems barely to register. Similarly, Chrissie seems oblivious to the betrayal enacted upon her sister by Dave, so caught up is she in a New Age dream that Dave entertained only until something better came along. For all her high-minded spirituality, she cannot escape the single motherhood to which Dave's death condemns her. Sally seems the most well-equipped to move redefine her circumstances, escaping from Canada and Dave's jilting with the dream of becoming a Monte Carlo blackjack dealer. But just as Dave was once able to seduce her with promises of love and a better life, Lou comes along and reenacts the same destructive dynamic.
If the people in this film are crushed by the weight of their pasts, capitalism, in contrast, marches unreflectively onward around them. Blessedly freed of consciousness, it is free to move toward the glory of a promising future without doubt or nagging memory. Malle allows this subtext to surface organically by surveying the entropic environment his drama inhabits. Billboards, crumbling hotels, and roving machinery seem to be characters just as much as the people they exist alongside. The elevated garage where Dave is murdered by the gangsters he conned continues its cyclical motion, consigning him to irrelevance in the face of economics both criminal and legitimate. Even the city's grand old hotels are shown little mercy, they stand only as obstacles to future profit, irrespective of the histories they contain. Their onscreen demolition bluntly confronts us with our own impermanence.
Odd, then, that Malle's film feels so warm. With such an abundance of human misery, painted onto an equally unpleasant canvas, you’d think this a thoroughly dour film. But by the time Lou and Grace sell the last of their illegitimate fortune and exit their longtime home together, even that insistent wrecking ball at work on the hotel behind them doesn't cast quite the shadow you'd expect. Sally exits the film driving away from it all, in thrall to a radio program about French wine. Her life's sadness is the most unfair after all she's done to escape it, but Malle doesn't deny her the possibility of happiness that she has been denied her until now. Even Chrissie comes off more endearingly beleaguered than a truly lost soul. If life ahead for her will be torturous, we have no indication of that in this film's diegesis. There's a tenderness to Malle's depiction of his characters which prevents his film's weighty themes from outright smothering them. Lou, our avatar of shameful old age, may be the least redeemable of this cast of lost dreamers, but the amount of time we spend with him at least lets us know he's afraid, not malevolent. His mistakes are the mistakes of someone who doesn't know how he’s supposed to start disappearing. Masculinity's bravado serves him no better than the women around him are by femininity’s enforced submissiveness. Age knows no gender binary. If our fate is to slip away from life as capitalism's machinery obstinately endures, better to do it by meeting our fellow humans on an equal plane without artificial divisions.
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