Promising Young Woman: Mulligan is Great, the Film is Uneven

 

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020)

Written and directed by Emerald Fennell

Focus Features, 113 minutes, R (sexual situations, drug use, violence)

★★★

 

 

 

This one could be subtitled “How Cassie Lost Her Mojo.” On paper, Cassandra Thomas (Carey Mulligan) has it all. She’s brainy, quick-thinking, beautiful, and comes from a good family. So why is she a 30-year-old medical school dropout, living at home, with no partner, and working in a dead-end job as a barista?

 

Promising Young Woman tackles the serious social problem of spirited girls and young women hollowed out by trauma. In Cassie’s case, it’s not she who was victimized, rather her best friend Nina. We never meet Nina, but we know that something bad happened to her that so scarred Cassie that she chucked her promise and withdrew into a cynical shell. Her parents (Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge) can’t crack that shell, and even her boss Gail (Laverne Cox), the closest thing she has to a friend, finds her perplexing. Nor do they know about her extracurricular activities. Cassie goes to clubs and bars, feigns extreme drunkenness, goes home with strange men, and scares the crap out of them when they discover she’s stone-cold sober and psycho-like menacing.  

 

From this we infer that Cassie fancies herself an avenging angel. Promising Young Woman deals with a he said/she said situation in which “she” isn’t believed. Not by a female law school dean (Connie Britton), not by men Cassie once considered friends, not by her female colleagues, and certainly not by the attorney (Alfred Molina) who eviscerated the victim and made her look like the little girl who cried wolf. Some of you might recognize the name Cassandra from Greek mythology. She was the Trojan prophetess whose curse was that she always told the truth, but no one believed her. Cassie has a tale to tell, but no one wants to hear it.

 

Maybe Cassie should do as another character (Molly Shannon) tells her to do: move on. When she meets the quirky, take-it-slow Dr. Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), she starts to do exactly that. But when she hears that Dr. Al Monroe (Chris Lowell) is getting married, things go very, very wrong. Cassandra morphs into Pandora and opens dangerous boxes filled with things that she would have been better off not knowing.

 

Mulligan was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role as Cassie. She didn’t win, but she certainly deserved to be considered. She strikes two contradictory chords. When she dons her nighttime warrior princess battle paints to haunt bars, she’s slutty and crazed; when she moves through the day, she is alluring and has just enough radiance peeking through that everyone wants to help her out of her rut. Maybe the real Cassie consists of both sides, but Mulligan keeps us guessing which part of her will prevail. Burnham also walks a thin line. In his case, we wonder if he’s an adorable goofball, or a man who is too good to be true. Promising Young Woman is essentially a two-person dance in which the rest of the cast contribute flesh-out-the-script cameos.

 

Would that the film matched its central performances. This is 35-year-year-old Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut and she has a good-but-not-great grasp on her task. Aspects of the story, central mystery, and lead performances are strong, but the total package is a neither fish nor fowl production that ultimately tantalizes but disappoints. I’m being literal about its essential lack of identity. You will see Promising Young Woman labeled as a feminist movie, a thriller, a drama, and a black comedy. It has dimensions of each, but let me ask this question. If you tried to make a mash of The Brave One, 9 to 5, Hard Candy, and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, what would it look like? And what if I asked you to add elements of Thelma and Louise and Joker?

 

Promising Young Woman is too good to dismiss, but you’d have to stretch the definition to call it feminist, rachet the fear factor to label it a thriller, smooth out its tone for it to be a drama, and the subject matter doesn’t lend itself to laughter. I’d add that lord knows men have a lot to answer for, but I’m not convinced that replacing stereotypes against women with those directed against men is much more than polishing a different boilerplate.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

 

Dark Pasage a Lesser Appreciated Bogart-Bacall Film

 

DARK PASSAGE (1947)

Directed by Delmer Davies

Warner Brothers, 106 minutes, Not-rated (Pre-ratings system)

★★★ ½

 

 

 

Dark Passage is a film noir offering that’s better regarded now than it was in its day. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which you might assume would assure box office success. It might have been, had Bogart been more visible, but more on that in a moment.

 

Vincent Parry (Bogart) has just escaped from San Quentin, where he’s doing time for the murder of his wife. As he flees, he catches a ride with an affable man named Baker (Clifton Young), who is instantly suspicious of his passenger’s dirty clothing and soggy shoes. When a radio broadcast describes Parry–who we do not see–Parry knocks out Baker and desperately makes his way toward San Francisco. He catches a ride with Irene Jansen (Bacall), who knows exactly who Parry is but has followed his case and is convinced he is innocent. She helps him avoid a roadblock and takes him to her apartment, but Vincent won’t stay there until he is less recognizable, lest he put Irene in jeopardy. He sneaks out and is picked up by a cab driver (Tom D’Andrea), who also recognizes Parry but isn’t the sort to rat. In fact, he takes Parry to a plastic surgeon friend, Dr. Walter Cooley (Houseley Stevenson), who completely alters his looks. Parry hopes to hole up with an old friend, George Fellsinger (Rory Mallinson), but finds George has been murdered.

 

He this returns to Irene’s apartment to finish recuperating. Irene has her reasons for helping–her father was falsely convicted–but mainly she’s a sassy, independent gal with a sometimes boyfriend named Bob, who she is decidedly not in love with. Keeping Parry hidden from Bob (Bruce Bennett) or her prying neighbor Madge Raft (Agnes Morehead) takes some serious fancy maneuvering, though the prodnose Madge suspects something fishy is going on and Vincent needs to avoid her as she once came on to him, was rebuffed, and she ended up testifying against him at his murder trial.

 

Irene plays nursemaid and we only see Bogart for the first time when his bandages come off. Dark Passage evolves into a mouse and several cats drama. The plot thickens when, the on-the-loose Vincent is the prime suspect in Fellsinger’s murder. This becomes a meandering mystery in which not everyone is who they appear to be. Is Vincent really a murderer, or was he–as he claims–framed? Watch and learn.

 

At the time, Bogart was considered a real heartthrob which, in retrospect, made it a bad gamble to think that his name alone would compensate for not seeing his mug for the first third of the picture. Today, Dark Passage seems innovative for its point-of-view shots, but maybe that's also because not many people continue to think of Bogie as devastatingly handsome. In many ways, it’s Morehead who steals the picture. She plays the role of the woman you want to hate. She is nosy, acidic, duplicitous, and ten kinds of nasty. Bacall is, as always, quick with a quip and magnetic. By 1947, everyone knew that she and Bogart were an item–they married two years earlier–and this was the third film they made together. Still, those expecting a storied on-screen romance would have been disappointed by Dark Passage, which is a much grittier movie.

 

There are aspects of the film that don’t hold up well. Stevenson’s role as Dr. Coley played much better in 1946 than it does 75 years later, though I suspect that even then Coley came off as more of a mad scientist than a surgeon. Young and Bennett are rather wooden and, though Young does what he could with the character of Baker, the script did him no favors. But the black and white film stock does for San Francisco what it would do for Tijuana 11 years later in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. In both cases, it’s the shadows that matter more than the light.

 

I won’t claim that Dark Passage is pathbreaking film noir like the masterful Touch of Evil, but it is an underappreciated and lesser-known effort that deserves a new look. I’d say it’s Humphrey Bogart as you’ve never seen him before, but it would be wrong of me to stoop that low!

 

Rob Weir

Can You Speak American? Don't Be So Sure!

 

SPEAKING AMERICAN (2016)

By Josh Katz

Houghton Mifflin, 224 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

I have been asked if there is anything I wanted to do in my academic years that didn’t happen. Leaving aside the fact that anybody in any career could answer “yes” to that question, there is one very cool thing I wish I had done. I wish I had been a field researcher for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE).

 

It’s no longer PC to quote Bill Cosby, but he once wryly observed that he never had any regret about not knowing lots of languages like cheek-by-jowl Europeans. The punchline: “I’m from Philadelphia, but I can speak Cleveland.” That’s a funny line, but it’s not a very accurate one. The reality is that where you live in America determines how you speak about, consider, and negotiate daily life. Want a long sandwich stuffed with vegetables and cold cuts? Is it a sub(marine), a grinder, a hero, a hoagie, or a po’(or) boy?

 

You might protest there is a difference between several of these; grinders and poor boys are usually hot sandwiches, for instance. Or not! It really depends on where you live. Want a milk- or ice cream-based drink to go with it? Do you order a milk shake, a malt(ed), a frappe, or a cabinet? The last of those is seldom used outside of Rhode Island and it is coffee-flavored–unless you’re in bordering parts of southern Massachusetts where you should specify the flavor. And don’t assume a frappe will have an egg in it, or that it won’t.

 

The DARE is a massive six volumes that were released over a 38-year period. Josh Katz’s Speaking American is a sampling in a compact 224 pages with maps and illustrations. It’s more of a coffee table book than a serious read, but it’s a delight nonetheless. It’s the kind of book that you and a friend or partner can read together on the sofa. Or is it a couch? Or a davenport? Maybe a divan. Furniture people will tell you those terms differ as well, but ignore them because whatever they say won’t wash in vast sections of the nation.

 

In the southcentral Pennsylvania of my youth, we used the term you’uns as a collective noun. In much of the South, it’s y’all; in sections of New York youse. But if you live in the greater Pittsburgh area it’s yins, which is almost never used anywhere else! What do you call the strip of vegetation that divides lanes of a highway? A median strip? A verge? A parkway? A lawn? Something else entirely? When you slip a pair of denim trousers, are they jeans, dungarees, chaps, overalls, or perhaps Levi’s in a non-copyrighted sense? Is a swirly frozen treat from a machine a creemee or soft serve? Do you ask for sprinkles or jimmies on it? And where do you keep the money for pay for it, in your wallet or your billfold? When your younger self wanted to raise Cain the night of October 30, did you call it Cabbage Night, Devil’s Night, or simply Mischief Night?

 

You get the picture. Cosby joked about it, but in many ways, speaking Philadelphia isn’t at all the same as speaking Cleveland, and it surely isn’t the same as speaking Birmingham, Houston, Little Rock, or San Francisco. And for heaven’s sake, never bring a casserole to a potluck in Minnesota; it’s a hotdish, thank you very much.

 

I’ve not even touched on the book’s discussion of pronunciations and accents. Sometimes it’s a wonder that Americans manage to talk with each other at all. Speaking American is, simply, a fun book. Grab a soda, pop, tonic, or (generic) coke and leaf through it. Or, if you’d rather, grab something alcoholic, if you can decide whether to purchase it at a packie, a beer barn, a party barn, a beverage barn, or a brew thru. Get good and soused, shit-faced, fried, blitzed, or tipsy and you can be outraged that the terms Katz identifies don’t match what you think. Whaddya want from 224 pages? You can always read all six volumes of the DARE, if you’d rather.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Father: Hopkins Deserved His Oscar

 

THE FATHER (2020)

Directed by FLORIAN ZELLER

Lionsgate/Sony Classics, 97 minutes, PG-13 (language, trauma)

★★★★★

 

 

One wonders why the Academy Awards bothered to air, given that the Covid pandemic kept most people out of movie theaters. Very few have seen The Father, so perhaps you are curious whether veteran British actor Sir Anthony Hopkins deserved a Best Actor Oscar. The answer is, yes, absolutely. The late Chadwick Boseman, a superb actor, was a sentimental favorite for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. I’ve not yet seen that film, but I’m sure Boseman sparkled. That said, performances such as Hopkins’ are rare and deserve to be honored.

 

The Father is powerful and moving. Hopkins plays Anthony, an elderly man whose grasp on reality is deteriorating. Although he has lived in an apartment owned by his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) for many years, he believes it’s the other way around. That’s the least of his issues. Sometimes he thinks Anne is married to Paul or Bill, though there are two men he “sees” as Anne’s husband (Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss), and sometimes he thinks she’s abandoning him to move to Paris with someone named James. There are moments in which he sees a caregiver named Laura (Imogen Potts) as his youngest daughter Lucy, and others in which he’s annoyed by Laura and insists, rather rudely, that he doesn’t need her and she should get out of his apartment. Or perhaps Laura is another person altogether (Olivia Williams), or maybe she’s Anne or a nurse named Catherine.

 

The Father is, sadly, a spot-on portrayal of someone with dementia. It is a maddening and heart-wrenching condition. When Anthony is lucid, he is a charming crank. When he first meets Laura, he tells her he was once a professional tap dancer and snaps off a sample for her amusement. Anne is astounded, as her father was actually an engineer! In his more confused moments, Anthony is convinced Paul or Bill are hurting him, or he can’t work out why the corridor to his apartment opens onto a hospital corridor.

 

Director Florian Zeller originally wrote The Father as a stage play, which would have been a fine format for the story. As a movie, The Father doesn’t venture out of the apartment very much, which also makes sense. After all, Anthony’s world is becoming increasingly claustrophobic. Full credit, though, to Zeller, because he keeps his audience as much in the dark as Anthony. We are never entirely certain which rooms actually exist and which ones are constructs inside of Anthony’s muddled mind. One brief flash on Lucy is probably the tip off of why she never visits her father, but we can’t even be sure of that. Nor can we tell with 100% certainty if Anne is married, separated, divorced, or was never married at all. In essence, Zeller positions us on ground that shifts as often as Anthony’s.

 

Hopkins is a brilliant illusionist. When he beguiles, are we seeing Anthony before his center began to crumble, or is it merely another fabricated fantasy room? When he rages, is his that of someone forced to act against his own will, or is it deeper internal outburst against what a small slice of him recognizes as his selfhood eroding? Or perhaps something even more primal, like naked fear?

 

Colman is equally impressive. As some of you know, my mother died from Alzheimer’s. Colman captures the rollercoaster of emotions that come from trying to care for someone whose mental marbles have escaped from the bag and are rolling toward the storm drain. Even the deepest love for another is challenged if that person repeats things like a programed talking doll and changes moods in the middle of a sentence, yet occasionally seems just enough like the genuine self to offer false hope. Colman–who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar*–plays Anne as one who, in her own way, is just as much at sea as her father.  

 

The Father is a classic ‘tough’ film and joins the ranks of others like Away from Her, Still Alice, and Amour that have dealt with dementia. In my mind, Amour remains the best of the lot, but Hopkins deeply deserves the acting hardware Emmanuelle Riva should have won in 2012. The Father is a film you might tell yourself you don’t wish to see. That’s exactly why you should.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Youn Yuh-jung won the 2021 Best Supporting Actress this year. Colman who as Best Actress in 2019 for The Favourite.

The Hare: A Cautionary Tale?

THE HARE (2021)

By Melanie Finn

Two Dollar Radio Books, 320 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

Can two damaged people find happiness in each other? What if one has no confidence and the other a highly distorted sense of reality?

 

Hares are shy, a trait that defines Rosie to a T. She was raised by a censorious grandmother in Lowell, Massachusetts. As Rosie put it, she grew up with the “cold, steady drizzle or Gran’s resentment.” She thinks she’s plain-looking and talentless. Rosie manages to obtain a scholarship to New York’s Parson School of Design, though she is convinced she has no real artistic talent–and she might be right. She has enormous difficulty in focusing or coming up with ideas.

 

The Hare shifts from Lowell to New York, and eventually to Southport, Connecticut, then Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Rosie’s main accomplishment in New York is to reconsider her physical appearance. This comes courtesy of Bennett Kinney, who claims to adore Rosie for her innocence and beauty. He is an unlikely suitor in that he’s nearly twice her age, is erudite, has fancy associates, and claims to deal in art and estate objects. Maybe. Lots of things about Bennett sound better coming out of his mouth than getting down to brass tacks. The Hare has been described as both a cautionary fairy tale and a tribute to female power. The first is certainly true; the second uncertain and problematic.

 

After being wined, dined, and courted, Rosie finds herself at a Southport housesit with Bennett and really begins to wonder if she’s out of her league. How many people have a Van Eyck hanging on the wall of their summer “cottage?” Or a boat house apartment that’s nicer than any place she has ever lived? People know Bennett there, though that’s not necessarily a good thing, as Bennett’s wealthy friends Hobie and Mitzi hint. Nor is Rosie sure exactly what Bennett and his associate Wheezie are up to. Because she’s a person of low self-esteem, Rosie struggles to determine if Bennett is shady or if she’s simply too inexperienced to comprehend what he tells her. To top it off, she’s pregnant and, in 1985, abortion is illegal.

 

Things get bit clearer when Bennett announces they are leaving Southport for Vermont, where he has been offered a teaching job at an offbeat small college near Barnet. (Sterling? Goddard?) They move into a poorly insulated cabin. Rural Vermont. Winter. Suspicious locals. Uh-oh. Were it not for the help of her cranky, rough-around-the-edges neighbor Billy, Rosie might not have survived. Billy teaches Rosie about things like woodstoves, wool socks, thrift store parkas, and coping with poverty. Bennett is seldom around and claims he has a room at the college as a reward for his stellar scholarship. Another perk is that they will soon send him to Paris. What is it Bob Dylan once wrote? “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

 

The Hare moves us from 1983 to 1985, 1991, 1993, and eventually 2019. On one level, The Hare is about how Rosie finds her groove. She notes, “Men mistake the act of submission for the condition of submission.” [Emphasis mine] But don’t unfurl the “Sisterhood is Powerful” banners. Rosie raises her daughter Miranda, copes, slowly integrates into the community, and becomes more self-sufficient, but her life isn’t exactly a vat of maple syrup. Many traumatic things will happen and there’s always the question of what do we do with a problem like Bennett. Not to mention there antigodlin locals who aren’t what they appear to be.

 

The Hare takes its title from Rosie’s character and from a frozen lagomorph she finds on her porch. The latter is a metaphor for the fragility of liife amidst harsh natural elements, and also for social class. Getting by is not the same as getting on. Many in the Northeast Kingdom are the sort for whom an unexpected car repair is an economic disaster. Author Melanie Finn drives home class themes throughout via various juxtapositions: Lowell versus New York, Southport versus the Kingdom, those with priceless art versus those who run of wood, those who can afford reassignment surgery versus those who buy cast-offs, and so on. Hers is not a flattering portrait of a nation severely split between have-everythings and have-nots. The novel sometimes suffers from being overly ambitious. Its sweep from 1983 to 2019 provides an arc for Rosie’s life, but involves foreshortening that make some actions and impulses less convincing than others. I shall leave it to you to determine whether the book’s denouement is effective and shocking, or implausible and contrived.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

Patrick Oliphant and Pops Peterson at Rockwell Museum

Pat Oliphant: Editorial Cartoons from the Nixon and Clinton Eras

Pops Peterson: Rockwell Revisited

Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Through May 31, 2021.

 

Illustrators and political cartoonists seldom get the attention of painters and sculptors. Luckily, the Norman Rockwell Museum piggybacks off its famed namesake to give due credit to those who toil in the same waters.

 

I have long admired the work of political cartoonist Patrick Oliphant (b. 1935). Not only is he a master at caricature, he has never been afraid to call it like it is. His work holds fire to the feet of those whose misdeeds warrant it. In today’s bifurcated nation, conservatives and liberals alike are quick to find the mote in the other’s eye while ignoring the beam in their own. That is, they ignore the foibles and malfeasance of those with whom they agree, but express outrage at every breath taken by those whose views they do not share. A current show at the Rockwell Museum juxtaposes Oliphant’s cartoons from the administrations of Richard Nixon (1969-74) with those of Bill Clinton (1993-2001).

 

Nixon, of course, will be forever remembered for Watergate, arguably the second worst threat to democracy in the modern era. Oliphant’s biting cartoons cast doubt on Nixon early on. His “Trust Me” references Nixon’s promise that he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. 

 

 

 

As we now know, that plan involved escalation of the war. Consider a cartoon depicting Nixon at the Lincoln Memorial as the flip side of “Trust Me.” His Vietnam policies–especially aerial bombings of Cambodia–sparked massive antiwar protests. By 1970, just 39% of the public approved of his handling of the war. That same year, Nixon attempted a bizarre ploy by paying a dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial and trying to discuss the war with young protestors sleeping there. Epic fail! 

 

 

Two other Oliphant offerings call attention to two other unsavory aspects of the Nixon years. His veto of campaign spending caps set the stage for the Citizens United decision and the GOP's shameless defense of a best-democracy-money-can-buy society. “Nixon saves” is a corollary. In it, we see that he has “saved” defense contractors, but is willing to allow those needing social services to fend for themselves.

 

 

But Pat Oliphant knows that the Hall of Shame has room for both parties. I have never understood liberals’ love of the Clintons, who have plenty of sleaze on their hands. Like Nixon, he distrusted the Clintons from the start. He drew them as Ozark hillbillies bent on looting anything not nailed down. Other cartoons deal with Whitewater and Hillary’s law firm. 

 

 

As we know, old Bonkin’ Bill was ultimately impeached for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. A particularly clever and nasty illustration shows us Bill with a dictionary in hand looking up the word perjury. Embedded are two in-jokes. During one hearing he quibbled with inquisitors over the meaning of the word “is.” In this cartoon he is also holding a cigar in his hand. Those who followed the hearings will recall that his cigar also had another receptacle.  

 

 

Ken Starr, though, was supposed to find financial wrong-doing. His dogged pursuit of the Lewinsky case ultimately bored the public and was perceived not as perjury, but as prurience. Bill wiggled free.

 

 

 

But Oliphant still saw the Clintons as carpetbaggers, a label he explicitly laid on Hillary in her New York Senate bid. Sounds right to me.

 

 

 

One revelation in the exhibit is that I had not known Oliphant was a sculptor as well. A displayed work of the lanky George H. Bush is like Giacometti-meets-presidential politics. 

 

 

 

☚     ☛     ☚     ☛     ☚      ☛     ☚     ☛

 

Another small exhibit features the work of Stockbridge resident and business owner Pops Peterson. His show “Rockwell Revisited” pays homage to Norman Rockwell, who once lived across the street from where Peterson works. Peterson isn’t well known, but his work is clever and poignant. He has taken several classic Rockwell illustrations and updated them for this moment in time. Here are a few of his offerings, which I offer as a game for you to play. See if you can match them to Rockwell’s originals. If you need some help, go here: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classic Film: Atlantic City

 

 

ATLANTIC CITY (1980)

Directed by Louis Malle

Paramount, 104 minutes, R (partial nudity, 1970s clothing)

★★★★

 

 

 

 

In Atlantic City, petty wiseguy Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster) looks over his shoulder at the slate gray sea and reminisces about his heyday: “The Atlantic Ocean was something then. You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.”

 

 My parents met and married in Atlantic City after World War II. They ended up moving to Pennsylvania, near where my mother was raised. Dad, a Worcester, Massachusetts native, frequently disparaged Pennsylvania and yearned for Atlantic City. I first visited as a child in the early 1960s. Steel Pier, the famed diving horse, and Boardwalk sedan chairs were still there, but the place was a dump. The film Atlantic City is set a decade and a half later, around the second time I visited. Remarkably, it was even worse. Visitors were advised not to venture into the city and with good reason: it was squalor, boarded storefronts, crime, and angry urbanites at their scariest. Change, though, was on the horizon. Old hotels were coming down and glitzy casinos were rising. We know how that turned out; small-fry hoods like Lou were pushed aside for big-time crooks and crime syndicates. (FYI: Donald Trump didn’t start fleecing Garden Staters until 1984.)

 

Burt Lancaster is our guide from romanticized past to squalid present and a future of misplaced hope. The story opens in Philadelphia, where another chiseler, David Matthews (Robert Joy), observes a drug drop in a phone booth (remember those?), steals the package, and heads to Atlantic City to sell it, with his pregnant girlfriend Chrissie (Hollis McLaren) in tow. He’s actually married to Chrissie’s sister, Sally (Susan Sarandon), who left her loser husband, moved to Atlantic City, and dreams of leaving her dead-end oyster bar job and becoming a blackjack dealer at a soon-to-be-opened casino. She’s taking card-dealing lessons from Joseph (Michel Piccoli), a haughty Frenchman and is trying to learn French in the bargain. Sally also has an interesting evening ritual. She stands in front the window by her kitchen sink, squeezes fresh lemons, and proceeds to rub the juice on her neck, shoulders, and breasts. She is unaware that her neighbor, Lou, watches her.

 

David and the hippie-meets-New Age Chrissie show up and Sally wants them gone, but relents and allows them to crash at her apartment for a few days. She knows nothing about David’s theft of drugs00. Not much good can come from a peeping Tom neighbor, a drug-dealing estranged husband who ripped off drugs from a Philly crime syndicate, an about-to-pop sister, a condemned apartment, and a pipedream. The appearance of some truly dangerous gangsters won’t help matters either. All of this opens the door for an unusual relationship with an unlikely protector, Lou. He too lives in a fantasy world–one that he has repeated so often it passes for truth, though all he’s done for many years is run low-level numbers rackets for a bigger hood, and walk the dog and rub the feet of faded celebrity Grace Pinza (Kate Reid).

 

Atlantic City takes us to unexpected places. It got five Oscar nominations at the 1982 ceremonies but didn’t win any, as On Golden Pond gobbled up a lot of awards. In retrospect, that film seems so much like a Hallmark weepie that one could say that Lancaster and Sarandon got jobbed. There is a reason why Lancaster was a Hollywood legend. His was a performance in which braggadocio, pathos, bathos, and kindness intermingled. That’s a tough balance to maintain, but he did so effortlessly. Sarandon also threaded a small needle, hers between conflicting traits such as determination, naiveté, wholesomeness, and a bit of double-dealing.

 

Atlantic City was mostly praised in its time and the performances of the four principals–add Reid to the mix–remain impressive. Some other things don’t stand up as well. Joy went on to do some TV work, much of it in Canada, but he’s pretty stiff in the film and McLaren is downright embarrassing. The late-70s fashions are also pretty hard on the eyes and the pursuing thugs are cardboard cutouts. The film probably also suffered at Oscar time from being a joint Canadian-French venture. (Hollywood always prefers to honor itself.) It also suffered from a romance/comedy/drama blend that doesn’t quite gel.

 

Another reason to check it out now (or revisit it) is for its implied warning about casino promises. Aside from a few Native-American reservations, casinos are like the blackjack table: the house wins and both punters and bandwagon-jumping politicians get fleeced. (Hello Bangor, Camden, Detroit, Springfield!) Atlantic City and its ocean might or might not have been something back then, but if given a choice of criminals like Lou or the gambling syndicates, I’d rather bet on the former.

 

Rob Weir