Some critics have spent their reviews of Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” detailing what doesn’t work for them: the wordless interludes feel like filler, the characters are thinly drawn, and there’s not enough holding the whole thing together. Then they spend one or two lines telling us how good Pamela Anderson’s performance is. To put it bluntly, the focus is all wrong. When a performance like Pamela Anderson’s comes along (and it rarely does, all things considered), it is an event and should be heralded as such. It warrants far more than just a few lines in a “meh”-toned review. This is a major moment for Anderson and a mind-blowing experience for those of us who witnessed her “Baywatch” rise in real-time and those who always liked her. If you were there, you know. Anderson’s accomplishment here defies easy comparison. It’s not a comeback. It’s a beginning.
“The Last Showgirl,” directed with melancholy sweetness by Coppola, features Anderson as Shelly, the oldest showgirl on the Vegas strip, and a “dinosaur” in the new entertainment world of Cirque du Soleil and explicit neo-burlesque acts. Feather-fanned rhinestoned showgirls are a relic of another supposedly more glamorous time. Shelly’s been performing in Le Razzle Dazzle for 30 years and is very proud of the show. She understands the historical continuum the show inhabits. “It’s a descendant of Parisian Lido culture!” she tells the disinterested younger dancers.
If you’re the only one who values the history, if you’re the keeper of the flame and nobody cares, what does it even matter? She feels she was part of history, and now history is being tossed away. She sits at home, watching “The Red Shoes,” dancing by herself, lost in a dreamworld, nostalgic for a time she just missed. When it’s announced that Le Razzle Dazzle will close in two weeks, Shelley descends into confusion and panic. Who will she be without the show? What is she even fit to do? And, more upsettingly: Was it all worth it?
The Razzle Dazzle showgirls make up a close-knit intergenerational group. They spend more time with one another than their real families, they know each others’ foibles (bad choices in men, poor money management, etc.), and call each other to account, but without rancor or malice. Shelly is the “mom” figure to two of the younger dancers, Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song, who look to her for advice, or gently rebel against her authority. Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a former showgirl, now cocktail waitress and gambling addict, complete with orange suntan and white lipstick. She and Shelly go way way back. In their own ways, all of them are a mess, but they have camaraderie, pulling each other along through the crisis. Dave Bautista is a real standout as Eddie, stage manager for Razzle Dazzle, and a soulful supporter of the women. Anything that’s going on in any given moment, Eddie picks up on it, and Eddie understands.
Kate Gersten is a busy television writer (“Mozart in the Jungle,” “The Good Place”), and in her first feature script she keeps it simple. The handful of characters circle around Shelly. “The Last Showgirl” takes place over the course of two weeks. The script doesn’t try to do too much. This is a feature, not a bug. By keeping it simple, Gersten (and Coppola) allow a lot of space for the performances to breathe. This is a very emotional film, but the emotions are not easily contained or even labeled. They float and zigzag around, ambushing Shelly or the others, easily laughed off (until they aren’t).
Shelly’s terror about the future is exacerbated by the unexpected arrival of the daughter she essentially gave away to her sister to raise. There’s been minimal contact since then. Hannah (Billie Lourd) is now in college, studying photography, and has shown up to see first hand what the hell was more important to Shelly than being a mother. Shelly’s insistence on putting a bright face on things, on pushing through the awkwardness to bond with her daughter – even though Hannah’s hostility is palpable – makes things worse. Shelly, facing the end of her career, as well as the ghosts of her past, the choices she made back then … starts to spiral. Anderson the actress has no distance from Shelly the character and so Shelly’s desperation, when it comes, rips the fabric of this gentle little film.
Hollywood is not known for treasuring its beautiful blondes, although it will make them famous (and then make them pay for it). But Anderson’s offscreen persona (you could see it in Baywatch too, if you were watching carefully) wiggled free from the exploitation vibes thrust upon her. She was giggly and sweet, and earnest to the point where you weren’t sure if she was on the level (she was). She had a good sense of humor about herself and seemed to really listen when people talked to her (a rare quality). It was all there back then and any keen observer might have recalled the screwball dames of eras past – kooky blondes like Goldie Hawn or Judy Holliday – and thought, “Why not set her free in something like that? It might work!”
But Hollywood didn’t do that. Hollywood barely used Anderson at all. She was treated carelessly. Nobody thought to challenge her with a real role, or even to “capitalize” on her fame in an interesting way. Someone had to dream this up. Someone had to say, “Let’s send this script to Pamela Anderson. She’d be perfect.”
And so “comeback” isn’t the right word at all for Anderson’s performance, one of the best of the year. Her performance is an inadvertent indictment of an industry who pumped her up while simultaneously de-valuing her, barely considering her an “actress” at all. Nobody could play Shelly the way Anderson plays it. “The Last Showgirl” sounds depressing, and of course it is. But Shelly is not “depressed”. She sparkles and giggles, she’s a funny motormouth, breathless and enthusiastic – especially when she’s trying to put on a happy face. When she can no longer manage the happy face, she cracks. Anderson is heartbreaking, adorable, truthful. She, like Shelly, looks out into the darkness beyond the spotlights, at an audience she can’t see, an audience primed for decades to under-value her, and she is not afraid.
