Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) The Last Showgirl announces its intentions and approach from its first frame. We open on a tight shot of the film’s star, Pamela Anderson, visibly nervous and stumbling over her words as she engages with an impatient man offscreen who holds her professional life in his hands. The harsh spotlight (literally and figuratively) and absence of makeup emphasizes the creases in her face and dry lips. She’s only 57, but we immediately understand those have been hard years of too many late nights and harmful extracurricular activities. The meta-commentary is so on the surface that it practically becomes the text itself: Anderson the actress and sex symbol has similarly arrived at an age where her value has been reduced to a number, and the same men who would have placed her on a pedestal in decades past callously dismiss her as a non-person. They no longer even need to smile when they do it.
As the title implies, The Last Showgirl, is an elegy for both an artform (in the most generous sense) as well as for the sort of woman who defines herself almost exclusively by her good looks; never having the inclination or opportunity to evolve as a worldly person. Somebody who found considerable success being objectified at a young age but now the music has stopped, the lights have been turned on and she continues to dance unaware that people are starting to stare. It’s a maddeningly relatable story with innate pathos, particularly as we’re regularly reminded that male contemporaries face no such scrutiny or fear of replacement by someone less seasoned waiting in the wings. Yet in Coppola’s telling, and in Anderson’s performance, every move is obvious, every feeling is telegraphed. The film is an incomplete sketch, leaning on generalities, inferences, and Vegas iconography. In striving for something universal, The Last Showgirl undershoots the target and lands on a scenario that registers as under-conceived. It concludes itself before it starts doing the real work.
Anderson plays Shelly, a dancer at the flailing Las Vegas topless show Le Razzle Dazzle. Shelly’s been with the show since the ‘80s (they’re still using nearly 40-year old photos of her for the publicity materials), but like many of the old casino mainstays, the revue has fallen onto hard times and is forced to share the room for half the week with the “burlesque circus” Hedonist’s Paradise, a “tits and ass” show that offers up the same nudity only without that rhinestone-adorned costumes or patina of Parisian class. Despite her decades working on the Vegas Strip, Shelly’s never developed a protective outer skin. Her heart is easily broken and she carries herself like a frazzled novice, dependent on assistance from younger dancers Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song) to help her with her quick changes. The crowds are thin and the pay is lousy — and gets worse by the day — but this is all she knows, and these women are her family, as is the production’s soft-spoken stage manager Eddie (a soulful Dave Bautista under a salt-and-pepper wig). When Shelly learns that the casino is pulling the plug on Le Razzle Dazzle, the 50-something dancer is confronted with a sickening uncertainty regarding the future. While her colleagues scramble and try to line up their next jobs, Shelly clings to the past: commiserating with a former showgirl friend who was put out to pasture (Jamie Lee Curtis) and has been forced to find work as a cocktail waitress, practicing ballet in her home (signifying, perhaps, a path not taken), walking the Strip at dusk to gaze out at the old Vegas casinos, and clumsily trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who still harbors resentment at being abandoned at a young age and can barely conceal her embarrassment over her mother making a living off of her body.
The analog to The Last Showgirl and this Anderson performance is Mickey Rourke’s career-redefining performance in The Wrestler, which similarly encouraged the viewer to grapple (no pun intended) with an actor’s offscreen baggage and tabloid infamy, serving as an emotional shorthand for the character. Both films are preoccupied with the fragility of the flesh as well as the toll and intoxication of performing for an adoring crowd that is no replacement for a family or simply a balanced home life. But while The Wrestler was rich in lived-in, frequently sickening details of “the lifestyle,” The Last Showgirl’s approach is glancing verging on superficial. Coppola’s made the principled decision to not depict her exotic dancer characters in a state of undress, and while showing on-screen nudity is in no way a prerequisite, it does speak to how little time we spend on the job with Shelly and these characters (who, again, are topless dancers). We never actually see any of the Le Razzle Dazzle stage show until the final, dreamy moments of the film; a curious and possibly budget-dictated choice — the entire film was shot in only 18 days — which flies in the face of the amount of pride Shelly still takes in her work and how much she’s defined by it (the irony being Anderson, having starred in the Broadway revival of Chicago, is presumably more than capable of performing the choreography). The entire film is very “details TBD,” with the dynamic between Shelley and Hannah remaining vaguely acrimonious. Interpersonal conflicts flare up without warning and seemingly resolve themselves just as quickly. The extent to which Hannah’s resentment is justified or Shelly’s damnation is deserved is danced around by Kate Gersten’s (a Coppola relative by marriage) screenplay. All we can say for certain is that Shelly is very, very sorry and wishes everything would just work out for the best.
It would be comforting to report that Anderson’s performance is a revelation, elevating the inherent flimsiness of the characterization with the kind of emotional honesty that might paper over some of the script’s threadbare qualities, but that’s simply not true. The actress —who like many bombshells and pop stars of the ‘90s and ‘00s has been the beneficiary of an ongoing cultural reckoning, particularly for the way they were exploited by the media to sell magazines — does not carry herself like a Vegas lifer, nor someone torn apart by a lifetime of regrets. It’s instead entirely rooted in surface-level responses to plot stimuli and conflicts, with the actress unable to shed her Marilyn-esque, bubbly facade even in the character’s solitary moments. Is Shelly’s naivete a form of selfishness or defense mechanism insulating her from confronting the life she walked away from? How is it that someone who’s worked as a nudie dancer since the Reagan administration is so ill-prepared for the harsh realities of living in judgment of insensitive men? How did she never see this day coming? These are the questions the actress is incapable of broaching, let alone answering. Instead, the performance paints entirely in primary colors: happy, sad, afraid, fearful, etc.
Coppola yanks away anything which might serve as a security blanket for Anderson: building every scene around her performance, scrubbing the actress’ face of beauty products and seemingly finding every unflattering angle from which to film her from, all while surrounding her with an accomplished ensemble of supporting players. But never is the gulf so evident between what the role demands and what’s actually delivered as it is in Shelly’s scenes with Billy. Appearing opposite Anderson, Bautista, who likewise has had to combat prejudices about his viability as an actor based on his previous “low” profession, is incapable of delivering a line or gesture which doesn’t come across as genuine. There’s nary a moment of the performance which isn’t internalized, conflicted, or weighted by shame — over Billy’s past with Shelly and his guilt at so quickly landing on his feet while his friend struggles to find a liferaft — and a desire to be a standup guy in a profession that rewards schmucks. It is everything that Anderson’s performance needed to be; speaking volumes while saying little, and turning any preconceived notions of who this performer is against us. You can sense the physically imposing yet outwardly gentle actor trying to help along his costar, encouraging her vulnerability, perhaps recognizing some kindred connection that Anderson simply can’t draw upon. The Last Showgirl should have been the perfect union of subject and subject matter, something truly wrenching or revelatory, but there’s little here beyond the attention-grabbing hook and what amounts to stunt casting. A peak behind the curtain only works if there’s something substantive to locate back there, not simply more smoke and mirrors.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.
