NATHAN WEINBENDER:
The first time we see Shelly, she’s stepping out of the shadows and into a spotlight, auditioning for a part in a show she will not get. It’s also like she’s stepped out of another time: she’s the most veteran performer in a long-running Vegas revue that has, up until recently, clung to dear life in an old-fashioned world of sequins, feather boas and permanently grinning chorus girls.
Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is set in the moment when Shelly realizes contemporary tastes have passed her by, and somehow she never noticed until now. She’s in her late ’50s, still doing the same routines from decades ago, still living in the house that she would have been able to afford as a star attraction in the 1980s. For Shelley, who’s played by Pamela Anderson, the show has become an extension of her, or maybe it’s the other way around. Anytime someone criticizes it for being passé, she sees it as a personal attack.
It’s easy to see Shelly as a tragic figure, representative of all the women abandoned by the craven whims of show business. But Coppola and screenwriter Kate Gersten don’t treat her with kid gloves, either. Shelly clearly sees herself as a maternal figure to the younger dancers, including two played by Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song, but only when it’s most convenient for her. Her own estranged daughter, played by Billie Lourd, is starting to come around again, but is clearly bracing to have her heart broken again.
With its handheld camerawork, 16mm film grain and slightly blurry anamorphic lenses, The Last Showgirl is aiming for a deliberately unromantic, fly-on-the-wall style. It feels almost like a rebuke to a similarly titled epic about the perversities of Vegas: Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. That film presented Sin City as a glittering Sodom and Gomorrah that chewed up and spit out anyone with even a modicum of innocence. The Vegas of The Last Showgirl is instead a tacky purgatory, full of lost souls wandering without purpose.
Some of those souls include impressive supporting performances by Jamie Lee Curtis as a perma-tanned former chorus girl, still working the casino floors as a cocktail waitress, and Dave Bautista as the stage manager of Shelley’s show, a surprisingly calming presence trying to keep things together as he stares down the inevitable.
The Last Showgirl has been positioned as a comeback for Pamela Anderson, who has never before had a dramatic role like this. In fact, most people probably don’t even think of her as an actress. Like Demi Moore in the horror hit The Substance, this is the case of an actor’s public persona imprinting onto her character. It’s impossible to look at Shelly and not think about the public scrutiny and scandal that dogged Anderson in the ’90s, and Coppola probably wants it that way.
At first, Anderson’s performance seems too mannered, overburdened with quirks and obvious line readings. But it becomes clear as the film goes on that Shelly is herself performing, even in private, still playing the part of a 1980s ingenue with a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. She’s one of many casualties of a landscape that only has time for women when they’re young, pliable and easy to idealize, which isn’t too far off from the movie business.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.