Pamela Anderson outshines her own fable in The Last Showgirl

The irony of starring in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl—about an aging Vegas dancer who lionizes the past as she grapples with her career, and life, being taken from her—is that Pamela Anderson has been given the exact opposite of what her character, Shelly, longs for. A woman of infamy during the ‘90s quietly relegated to the butt of jokes and reality television for much of the decades after, Anderson took the lead role of Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway for eight weeks in 2022 and now, at 57 years old, has been given what the actress described as “the role I have been waiting for my entire career.” The world is cruel to women, but Hollywood is crueler, and it’s even crueler than that towards women past a “certain age” which seems to only keep getting younger. Anderson spent years mired by scandal and media cruelty, but if there’s one thing that Hollywood loves more than hating women, it’s a comeback story.

With this personal narrative in mind, Anderson’s performance is made all the more powerful in a film that otherwise coasts on the strength of its lead actor. Anderson stars alongside Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song, as Jodie and Mary-Anne, respectively, all dancers in an old-school, last-of-its-kind show on the Vegas strip called “Le Razzle Dazzle.” Shelly likes to remind her younger cohorts constantly of that allegedly French-inspired style as validation of the show’s high-class edge in comparison to the more contemporary nudie shows they compete with. But it’s likely that old-fashioned flair which has made it nose-dive in ticket sales after almost 40 years, and thus made it easier for the owners of their theater to trade Le Razzle Dazzle for a circus act. 

This bombshell—dropped on them by the show’s producer, Eddie (Dave Bautista)—puts the three women in financial precarity. But no one has more reason to be concerned than Shelly, not only at the tail-end of middle age (Anderson’s unequivocal beauty notwithstanding) but also stuck in her ways like a stubborn mule. Shelly physically lives in the past, not only devoted to a show frozen in time and carrying herself like the same nervous, naïve young woman she might have been 30 years ago, but also decorating her home so that it practically looks like a set from an old Hollywood film—and she watches those, too. All the while she is viewed as a surrogate mother figure by the younger women around her, a somewhat unrequited label that she responds to with reproach. The chance to make up for her failings as a single mom to Hannah (Billie Lourd) isn’t something she’s interested in—she’d rather be viewed by Jodie and Mary-Anne as a peer.

Shelly commiserates with her friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a former showgirl and current cocktail waitress. Annette has been experiencing her own dose of age-related prejudice as she finds her hours increasingly cut to make room for the younger servers. Older women are quietly shuffled off, out of sight, out of mind, so that they just disappear as if they’d never been there at all; as if they had died along with their younger selves. It’s an unfortunate fact presented in sharp contrast against Coppola’s film, which plainly shoots Anderson and Curtis in little to very revealing clothing, like in a refreshing scene where Shelly accompanies Annette to change in her work locker room and Curtis strips to only her bra and underwear. Presented in a medium shot, Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s camera does not opt for a close-up to shield the audience from a 66-year-old woman’s body.

But Shelly’s obstinance also reflects the choices she made for Hannah. As a single mom, Shelly struggled to make ends meet but refused to give up her dancing dreams. So, she sacrificed security for her daughter in favor of the chance to be seen, loved, and fawned over by millions of people. It left Hannah, now 22 and about to graduate college, resentful.

It’s a nuanced topic handled with slipshod care throughout Kate Gersten’s screenplay, which relies heavily on awkward expository dialogue. For an 88-minute film that traffics in dreamy handheld sequences and focuses much on what’s left unsaid, Gersten’s dialogue is unwieldy in comparison. Tense conversations are deflated by single clunky lines, all at odds with the way The Last Showgirl is happily unwilling to hand over easy catharsis to Shelly or any of her relationships. The result is an incongruous skeleton of a film, with words that say too much clouding a movie that doesn’t want an easy ending. Placed in context with Coppola’s earlier work in Palo Alto and Mainstream, it seems like she’s become accustomed to directing films that feel like outlines.

It’s Pamela Anderson’s deceptively fragile performance that shoulders The Last Showgirl, her breathy, girlish rasp the perfect match for Shelly’s fluttery chatterbox personality. She is captivating, fully dissolved in the character, and it’s evident the extent to which Anderson is injecting her performance with her own complicated feelings towards aging, success, and spectatorship. This spiritual connection between character and performer imbues Shelly with a dose of pathos that Anderson taps into without obvious effort, all while still making it clear that Shelly isn’t Pamela Anderson.

The Last Showgirl is less about nostalgia and being stuck longing for the past than it is about the impossibility of womanhood, implicit in the content of a voicemail Shelly leaves Hannah. Hannah visits one of the last performances of her mom’s show to see just exactly what dream Shelly chose over giving her a stable childhood: “A stupid nudie show,” she calls it. Maybe Shelly made the wrong choices, but in a world eager to cast women into the shadows, it’s easy to understand her choice, to understand the fear of being pushed into social exile when the world has decided it doesn’t want to look at you anymore. It’s a shame The Last Showgirl doesn’t go to greater lengths to examine these ideas, but it’s no small triumph that it has provided a generous showcase for the type of acting Pamela Anderson has clearly wanted to prove to the world she was capable of. As her show closes, Shelly tells her boss, “You’re gonna be just fine, and I just have to disappear.” It’s a miracle that Anderson didn’t.

Director: Gia Coppola
Writer: Kate Gersten
Starring: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Billie  Lourd, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song
Release Date: December 13, 2024