Pamela Anderson’s wobbly mid-career trajectory takes a lightweight but engaging detour into poignant indie drama with Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, which milks maximum emotional mileage from its loosely autobiographical parallels with the former Baywatch star. Anderson plays the longest-serving cast member of a creaky Las Vegas revue show, which is set to close after a multi-decade run, leaving her devastated. Premiered in Toronto, the film makes its European debut in San Sebastián this week. With more festivals to follow, it should build a healthy art-house audience, with curiosity boosted by its star’s lingering fame and profile.
The third feature from Coppola, who is granddaughter to Francis and niece to Sofia, The Last Showgirl makes a noble attempt to give Anderson the kind of elegiac midlife role that won Mickey Rourke a pile of awards in Darren Arofonsky’s The Wrestler (2008). It also feels like an unlikely sister film to Demi Moore’s current splashy comeback in Coralie Forgeat’s deranged horror-comedy The Substance, which addresses similar themes of middle-aged women being dropped by a brutally sexist entertainment industry for being deemed too old and unsexy.
Coppola’s minor-key drama is too slight to match either of these in impact, but it is a noteworthy, Carver-esque snapshot of the underbelly of the American Dream. Building on Anderson’s feted Broadway run in Chicago, and her well-received profile documentary for Netflix, The Last Showgirl will certainly boost the Canadian-born star’s range and respectability.
Anderson stars as 57-year-old Shelley, who has been dancing for 30 years in a vintage Las Vegas revue show called Le Razzle Dazzle. Shelly has a deep emotional investment in this old-school production, which she views as classy throwback to more innocent times, before the Strip became vulgarised by more flashy, sexually explicit acts. But to her younger cohort of fellow showgirls like Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song), it is just another booty-shaking, money-making gig. And to Shelly’s semi-estranged 22-year-old daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), an aspiring photographer based in Tucson, this is the “lame nudie show” that her single mother ritually neglected her for when she was a child, an abandonment issue she is still struggling to forgive.
When stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista) reluctantly breaks the news that Le Razzle Dazzle is finally closing to make way for a contemporary circus act, most of the cast see this mercy killing as painful but inevitable. But for Shelley, who has invested her whole life and personality in the show, the closure is an existential disaster. Not even the best efforts of her closest friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a well-intentioned but broke, boozy, sixty-something cocktail waitress, can help as the realisation slowly sinks in that her youth, beauty and career are all fading. When a bleak audition for a new stage job ends in rejection, Shelley’s desperation boils over: “I’m 57 and beautiful, you son of a bitch!” she bawls at the casting director, played by Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman in a brief cameo.
With a scrappy script that relies too heavily on archetypal characters and on-the-nose dialogue, The Last Showgirl is far from perfect. Too any wordless sequences of Shelley stumbling around the grungy concrete fringes of Vegas in a daze, her face illuminated by symbolic sunsets and poetic bursts of lens flare, serve as flimsy connective tissue between a handful of substantial scenes. Drenching these freewheeling visuals with Andrew Wyatt’s perfumed ambient-rock score, Coppola’s dreamy, woozy, focus-blurring aesthetic often invokes that of her aunt Sofia here, not always successfully.
Anderson’s performance is also mannered in places, breathy and babbling, with Marilyn Monroe overtones. All the same, she radiates a compelling, brittle, nervy energy as Shelley, and sportingly submits to some very unflattering bare-faced close-ups designed to exaggerate her wrinkly, ageing appearance. She inhabits her character with conviction and empathy, smartly resisting cheesy sentimentality or tragic diva melodrama. Extra acting honours go to Curtis, whose wigged-out comic turn finds soulful authenticity in the depths of grotesque excess, and to action star Bautista for a rare, understated, quietly revelatory indie-drama role.
Director: Gia Coppola
Screenwriter: Kate Gersten
Cast: Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman
Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw
Editing: Blair McClendon, Cam McLauchlin
Production designer: Natalie Ziering
Music: Andrew Wyatt
Producers: Robert Schwartzman, Natalie Farrey
Production companies: Utopia Originals (US)
Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In English
86 minutes
