Plot: When the glittering Las Vegas revue she has headlined for decades announces it will soon close, a glamorous showgirl must reconcile with the decisions she’s made and the community she has built as she plans her next act.
Review: A lot of press has surrounded Pamela Anderson’s role in The Last Showgirl. After returning to acting in 2022 with a stint in a Broadway production of Chicago, Anderson released her memoir Love, Pamela and a corresponding Netflix documentary in 2023. With Lily James portraying Anderson in the Hulu limited series Pam & Tommy, Anderson has again entered the pop culture limelight, with many hailing The Last Showgirl as the actress’s revelatory rebirth as a dramatic actress. Directed by Gia Coppola, The Last Showgirl is an intriguing and devastating look at a fading aspect of Las Vegas and a stark portrait of a woman reflecting on the missed opportunities in her life. With a stellar supporting cast led by a fantastic Jamie Lee Curtis, The Last Showgirl is a melancholic portrait of getting older that gives Pamela Anderson a showcase for what she is capable of as an actor.
The Last Showgirl opens with Shelley (Pamela Anderson), a fifty-seven-year-old showgirl who is auditioning after she learns from stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista) that her show, Razzle Dazzle, has been set to close its multi-decade run as the casino owners begin looking for a more modern act to take its place. The news shocks Shelley and her coworkers Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). The news shakes Shelley as her age signals the potential end to her career, something she sees in her best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a former showgirl who quit to become a cocktail waitress. Knowing she only has a few weeks of employment left, Shelley begins to reflect on her decisions and the lack of a relationship with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), whom she sent away to live with another family while Shelley pursued her dream. Shelley contemplates whether she can get a job with another dance troupe as she refuses to take work as an escort or do anything other than be a traditional showgirl.
Wearing little make-up when her character is not performing on stage, Pamela Anderson literally strips Shelley down to her most vulnerable aspects. We see her shopping for a date that fails to happen and spends time with her fellow showgirls as they think about their lives. Jodie, who is only nineteen, looks up to Shelley as a maternal presence while Shelley tries to find a way back into her daughter’s life, something Hannah is reluctant to do after years of being left to her own devices. Pamela Anderson does what she can with the role, which is not as robust as I had expected. Much of the film follows Shelley in a documentary-like fashion as she talks to the different people in her life. There are several substantial sequences for Anderson to shine, including an emotional dinner with Eddie, a breakdown opposite Brenda Song’s Mary-Anne, and a tumultuous audition for a director (Jason Schwartzman) in which Shelley confronts her age and limited skills. All of these moments are highlights in Anderson’s performance, while the rest of the time, she takes a backseat to her co-stars.
The rest of The Last Showgirl‘s ensemble all have much more experience working with material like this, and Brenda Song and Dave Bautista are doing good work in their brief roles. Kiernan Shipka and Billie Lourd play distinct aspects of both the real and surrogate daughters in Shelley’s life. The highlight is Jamie Lee Curtis, who overshadows Anderson’s performance with her own showcase of a role. Curtis dons an even less flattering appearance than she did in her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All At Once to play Annette. With a deep orange fake tan, a red wig, and a bustier that leaves little to the imagination, Curtis is brash and loud compared to the more subdued performances from everyone else in the cast. She even has a solo dance performance set to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” that fits perfectly with the film’s tone, even if it is somewhat incongruously placed in the middle of the movie. Curtis may be in store for an Academy Award nomination for this film over Pamela Anderson’s more publicized comeback.
Written by Kate Gersten and based on her unproduced stage play Body of Work, The Last Showgirl is director Gia Coppola’s third film behind the camera, which is the first she did not write. Coppola’s strength as a filmmaker is more apparent in The Last Showgirl than in either of her prior films, Palo Alto and Mainstream. Using a lot of fuzzy, out-of-focus shots and handheld visuals, the film was shot over eighteen days and had a definite indie quality to it. The film shares much in common with Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Black Swan. Like Mickey Rourke’s broken-down fighter, Pamela Anderson’s Shelley is a world-weary veteran who does not know if she still has a place in the world that has moved on from where her career started. Shelley also has similar psychological strife compared to Natalie Portman’s ballet dancer, with The Last Showgirl’s closing sequence a hallucinatory reflection on her final days as a dancer.
The Last Showgirl is a more restrained film than we have seen from Gia Coppola so far, allowing it to have a more raw and realistic feel that serves the subject matter well. Everyone in the cast is quite good, even if the film is underwhelming compared to the buzz being generated for Pamela Anderson. Anderson does good work in a role vastly different from The Bombshell typecasting she was synonymous with, and it is nice to see her allowed to do more than serve as eye candy. The Last Showgirl boasts a memorable original song from composer Andrew Wyatt and singers Miley Cyrus and Lykke Li, which could earn the film an Oscar nomination. Still, I don’t think the overall movie is as strong a contender as some would have you believe. Definitely worth checking out for Jamie Lee Curtis’ standout performance and an impressive return to the screen for Pamela Anderson.
The Last Showgirl opens in theaters on December 13th.