Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl begins with an audition. Shelly (Pamela Anderson) hasn’t done so in a long time, perhaps never. She’s particularly nervous about showcasing her talents away from Le Razzle Dazzle, a revue program on the Las Vegas strip that has been her steady income for over thirty years. Shelly was once the show's lead, at the front and center of its poster and on the stage. But age has caught up to her, and she is now relegated to the back of the stage, while younger women Mary Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) are the program’s leads.
Coppola smartly decides not to reveal the show for most of the film’s efficient 89-minute runtime. Everything occurs backstage or outside the casino, from dressing room conversations to “girls’ night” at Shelly’s home. With the aid of cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, a real sense of intimacy strikes The Last Showgirl’s aesthetic, either through extreme close-ups of Anderson’s face or in moments of solitude that act as bridges from one scene to the next.
Some may be perplexed at Coppola’s decision to include a scene where Shelly’s best friend, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), dances to Bonnie Henry’s Total Eclipse of the Heart while on shift at the casino or when Shelly is alone in her home, watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and practicing her ballet alongside it. But they’re the two scenes that inform us the most of the characters’ vulnerabilities more than any line of dialogue would, not only in how the two reminisce of their once attractive bodies but in directly reckoning with the idea that all good things must come to an end.
Case in point: Le Razzle Dazzle’s producer, Eddie (Dave Bautista), tells Shelly that the show will have its last performance in two weeks and is set to be replaced by a more contemporary neo-burlesque act. What was once a safe haven for Shelly and the girls will no longer exist, forcing the aging entertainer to question if this life she had “on top of the world” was worth it when it’s all going away as if it never existed in the first place. From that central question, she feels compelled to call her estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who has lived with Shelly’s sister ever since she decided to prioritize the show over raising a family.
To her shock, Hannah knocks at her front door, and the two reunite. However, their reconnection is marred by Hannah’s disdain towards her mother, who never understood why she was abandoned in favor of a frivolous production for which no one is currently buying a ticket to see. Shelly has put on a show for a while in a relatively empty auditorium. The acts are dated, the performances representing a bygone era of showmanship that few are interested in spending precious hours on their time with. Yet, she still believes in it. So strongly that she would only choose to reunite with her daughter when everything around the show is going away.
Pamela Anderson Magnifies the Screen
The movie becomes, for Shelly, a push-pull between wanting to stay in the spotlight or begin to reconnect with the ones she should be closest to. Of course, we know what she will ultimately choose, but it doesn’t make the journey less heart-wrenching. There’s an aching melancholy within Anderson’s performance as Shelly that she was never allowed to tap into precisely because she was put in a box early on as a “sex symbol” after starring as C.J. Parker in Baywatch. This was then further exacerbated when she led David Hogan’s Barb Wire and was nominated for a Worst Actress Golden Raspberry Award, permanently tainting her film career before it even had a chance to begin.
With The Last Showgirl, Anderson finally shows what kind of actress she is made of, away from the egregious labels she was stuck with for most of her career. It’s why no one can qualify her performance as a “comeback” because she had no productions where her actual talents in front of the camera were showcased. Instead, her turn as Shelly is one of the most revealing and heartbreaking lead roles one could see all year. Anderson approaches each scene with a joyful, contagious smile and a bubbling, almost child-like personality. However, as Coppola progresses to the film’s conclusion, we quickly realize these traits are there to mask her most significant insecurities and regrets as a human being who never had a chance to feel anything but the euphoria of the spotlight for over thirty years.
There’s also a metatext on Anderson’s real-life career that’s compelling to observe but not nearly as developed or as touched upon as it should be. But it almost doesn’t matter since Anderson has longed to star in a motion picture that actively treats her as the actress she is. In only 89 minutes—or 80 if you don’t count the end credits—she imbues Shelly with so much raw power and intimate feeling that it’s hard not to shed a tear when the film’s final scene occurs, uncertain of what the future holds for her, but hopeful that it will at least be on her terms.
This scene gives The Last Showgirl its raison d’être, even if Coppola frequently stumbles in providing the supporting characters the same care as her lead protagonist. There’s a story longing to be told for Annette or even Eddie (who we learn shared an intimate relationship with Shelly many years ago). Yet, they are barely developed and don’t act as fully-formed characters within the realistic, humanist lens Coppola inserts them within Arkapaw’s visual language. The emulsion of 35mm certainly adds a texture to the strip, captured in ways that have seldom been depicted on screen (most recently, Sean Baker offered joyful fleeting glimpses of Las Vegas in Anora). However, the lingering shots of Anderson’s face are the most effective and personal because they tap into Shelly’s psyche in such an affecting, soulful way that the audience inadvertently gets involved in her journey of “reawakening” as the spotlight begins to shut down.
Shelly isn’t just a “role” for Pamela Anderson. It’s her way of telling the people who have shunned her from the very beginning, thinking she was just a “pretty face” and nothing else, that this is they who regretfully let go. It takes a lot of courage to finally reveal herself like this after being told who she should be—and represent—throughout her past short-lived film and television career. But Shelly is Pamela Anderson. It’s who she always was and what she always wanted to showcase. Now, the spotlight is hers, and hers only.
The Last Showgirl is now playing in select cinemas, with an expansion planned for January 17.