Pamela Anderson finds gold under glitter of Last Showgirl

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This article was published 17/01/2025 (260 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A mood piece about age and obsolescence, The Last Showgirl is a slender 89-minute drama with a shimmery, delicate vibe. Centring on the dying days of an old-style Las Vegas revue, the story draws its poignance from Pamela Anderson’s tremendously tender lead performance.

The film opens with a brief flash forward — mercifully brief because it’s a dance audition, and Shelly (Anderson) is struggling. We immediately feel for her, and by the time we come around again to a fuller look at this scene, now realizing how and why Shelly is here, it’s even more devastating.

After that anxious glimpse of Shelly’s audition, we go back a few days, to an announcement by longtime stage manager Eddie (Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista) that Le Razzle Dazzle, the show that has been Shelly’s professional home for over 30 years, will be shutting down in two weeks.

Scripter Kate Gersten, a TV writer making her feature-film debut, sets up a deliberately simple narrative timeline and then breaks it into fragments, some evocative and moving, some a little too slight. We get glimpses of Shelly as she tries to reconcile herself to her past decisions and possible future.

Director Gia Coppola (Palo Alto, Mainstream) follows these brief encounters with a light hand and an always empathetic camera. Shelly might assert that their floorshow is all about “spectacle,” but the film is resolutely anti-spectacle.

There’s a loose, low-key realism here. We soon see that away from the rhinestones and feathers, under the exaggerated stage makeup, Shelly is just a fiftysomething woman barely getting by, without a pension or health insurance, probably a few paycheques away from losing her small tract house.

From conversations backstage, we learn that the “le” in Le Razzle Dazzle is doing a lot of work, as Shelly keeps reminding the other dancers that their show “has its origins in French culture” and the glories of the Paris Lido.

She holds to a vision of glamour, grace and artistry, clinging to memories of her 1980s heyday.

The younger women aren’t convinced. Jodie (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) views her job as a slightly ironic adventure and is already checking out the sexually explicit live performances that are edging out the rather tame “T & A” of the old-school Vegas revue. Practical Mary-Anne (Dollface’s Brenda Song) just needs the money.

Shelly might be a den mother to these younger dancers, but her own daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd of Scream Queens), remains distant. It’s unclear what might happen with Eddie (lovely, understated dramatic work from Bautista), with whom Shelly has some unspecified history.

And then there’s Shelly’s hard-living, brassy best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, who’s become a reliable scene-stealer recently in projects such as Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Bear and The Sticky). Annette is a former dancer now waitressing in the casinos in a push-up bra, shiny control-top pantyhose and frosted lipstick, and there’s a beautifully sad scene in which she drunkenly recalls her showgirl days with a spontaneous performance choreographed to Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Just as 2024’s The Substance benefitted from the sense that it was, in some ways, a grotesque mirror of Demi Moore’s own life as an older female star, The Last Showgirl gains layers of meaning from Anderson’s personal and professional trajectory. A onetime “Baywatch babe,” a tabloid-scandal survivor, the Canadian-born Anderson has remade herself many times, and here she’s using the travails of a 57-year-old Vegas showgirl to tell some of her own story.

Anderson’s performance isn’t perfect. There are some technical wobbles, when Shelly’s breathy voice and sweetly delusional optimism fall short of the moment. But there are other scenes — as when she preps to go onstage, practising a desperately happy smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes — when she might break your heart.

Shelly might be mourning the end of something, but Anderson, with this vulnerable, honest performance, is looking ahead.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca