Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

Baseball in Durham is No Bull

Last Wednesday, while my L.A. Dodgers were thrashing the San Diego Padres, trying to inch toward a major league title (fingers crossed!),  I decided to rewatch my all-time favorite baseball movie, 1988’s Bull Durham. To my surprise, it was released the year before Kevin Costner starred as a dreamy Iowa farmer who wills a vintage baseball team into being as a way of reconciling with his dead father in Field of Dreams. The Costner of Field of Dreams was young, fresh-faced, idealistic, and basically innocent. In Bull Durham, though, he seems perhaps a decade older, much smarter and more cynical, someone who has tried and failed to fulfill his early promise.

 Part of Bull Durham’s success comes from the fact that it was written and directed by someone who really knows the sport, knows what happens on the field—and off. Ron Shelton, a former minor league infielder, brings to the film a gritty understanding of how baseball is played, and what games are played in the shadow of America’s National Pastime. This was his first film as a director, and it has led him to score with other sports-related projects, like White Men Can’t Jump (1992, about the world of playground basketball hustlers), and Tin Cup (1996, about professional golf,  once again starring Costner). Wikipedia notes that “in 2022, Shelton's book The Church of Baseball: The Making of Bull Durham: Home Runs, Bad Calls, Crazy Fights, Big Swings, and a Hit was published by Vintage Books." It sounds worth reading.

 Although Bull Durham deals with the exploits of a minor-league baseball club, the Durham (North Carolina) Bulls, it is less about a team and more about three individuals who are very much in the team’s orbit. The film’s opening line belongs to Susan Sarandon, who as Annie Savoy starts us out, in voiceover, with her philosophy of life. It begins with “I believe in the church of baseball,” then goes on to philosophize about the game as a sort of earthy substitute for formal religion. The provocative Annie, who during the year teaches literature, dedicates her summers to education of a different sort. Settling on a young, attractive player, she enjoys hot sex while also building his confidence and throwing in some lessons in basic baseball skills. For this particular summer, she chooses the naïve but mega-talented Ebby Calvin Latoosh (Tim Robbins), a pitcher who is as of yet too erratic and too cocky for stardom.

 The third member of this very dynamic triangle is “Crash” Davis (Costner), a worldly-wise catcher who once spent 21 days in the major leagues, doing nothing very spectacular before being sent back down to the minors. With his playing days numbered, he’s been added to the Durham roster to keep Latoosh under control and try to clue him in to the secrets of big league success. Smart but prickly (even though he’s a romantic at heart), Crash captures Annie’s interest when he strongly rejects the idea of auditioning for a role in her menage. Naturally, the sense that he’s his own man, and not one of the adoring “boys” who surround her, piques her curiosity.

 In a sense this is a film about the clash of innocence and experience, as well as about the push-and-pull between talent and wisdom. At the film’s end, Latoosh is headed for the majors (having learned a few life lessons along the way) but who’s to say that Crash won’t be happier in the long run? The irony is that in real life Sarandon and the much younger Robbins ended up together for more than two decades.

 

 

Waiting for Kamala: the Journey of Thelma and Louise

Over the weekend, as our nation confronted the prospect of its first female vice-president, I went back to a movie that made a major splash almost 30 years ago, Thelma & Louise. This film directed by Ridley Scott from an Oscar-winning script by newcomer Callie Khouri, generated box-office bucks and critical acclaim for taking a mostly-male genre, the buddy road-trip flick, and turning it into a powerful exploration of a woman’s place in the American landscape.

 Thelma & Louise starts out, as so many road-trip movies do, with two very different characters getting ready to go on a journey. The mood is light-hearted, even comedic, as sassy Louise (Susan Sarandon), a waitress in an Arkansas café, phones her ditsy friend Thelma to nudge her into action. Their destination is a fishing cabin, but Thelma (Geena Davis), the wife of a local car dealer, seems so daunted by the prospect of heading out of town that she can’t quite bring herself to alert her spouse that she’ll be gone for two nights. Thelma, it appears, is so much under the thumb of the domineering Darryl that she has a hard time thinking for herself. Which is why she packs pretty much everything she owns.

 Away from Darryl, Thelma gives herself over to impulse. She insists to Louise that they stop at a Texas-style honkytonk bar, where she drinks too much and then cozies up to a flirtatious local named Harlan. It’s all in good fun—until it isn’t. Out in the parking lot, Harlan is pawing at her clothing, bent on sexual satisfaction by any means necessary. That’s when Louise appears, brandishing the handgun that Thelma had casually brought along.

 What happens from that moment onward reflects the inevitable fate of two women caught in a man’s world. With the law on their trail, they run up against such antagonists as a sexy hitchhiker (Brad Pitt, in his first big role) who steals their money and a horny trucker who’s itching for trouble. Not to mention Thelma’s husband back home, who clearly regards her plight as a mere inconvenience. Though the film has been accused of having an anti-male bias, a few generous-spirited men do emerge, including Harvey Keitel’s sympathetic police detective and Louise’s supportive boyfriend. Still, the point is that the women in this world, lacking much in the way of education or earning power, exist to be victimized. It is only when an act of violence releases them from normal social expectations that Louise and Thelma feel free to blossom—for a while.

 Seeing the clingy, confused Thelma come into her own is, in its way, a beautiful thing. As for Louise, the natural-born leader of the pair, she’s fighting off something that is never clearly defined. We know only that she left her Texas hometown after a traumatic incident she will not discuss. Her role in perpetrating the violence that fuels the rest of the film seems to have evolved, we realize, out of a long-delayed reaction to a moment that has made her suspicious of men forever.

  Thelma & Louise owes something to 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, the lovers-on-the-lam classic that made bank robbery seem exhilarating, while also exploring the implications of the socio-economic divide between rich and poor. It also, in its end-of-the-road climax, perhaps contains a tiny echo of 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But most of all this is a film that focuses on the fraught power dynamic between men and women.

Kamala Harris—well-educated, well-placed, and capable—is a much more encouraging example of how women’s power can evolve.