Review: The Last Showgirl

Director:  Gia Coppola

Stars:  Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Kiernan Shipka

I’ve always felt kind of bad for Pamela Anderson, a model-turned-actor who tried to navigate the reductive worlds of Playboy and Baywatch with a sweet earnestness. Even those puff interviews for video centrefolds belayed someone eager to please but doubtful of their right to take on the spotlight. A misogynistic media was quick to turn her into a one-joke punchline and, like many women gilded for her youth and looks, seemed over-willing to tear her down when scandals came a’calling.

If Anderson lacked range in the ’90s, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Enjoyably trashy shows like VIP show off a legitimate knack for comedy. For all it’s faults, Barb Wire is a knowing camp romp and a perennial comfort watch here. But her spotlight seemed eager to contain her, rather than follow her. Soon cameos in bad parody films seemed like all she was allowed.

The last few years seem to have finally allowed some rehabilitation. Craig Gillespie’s odious Pam & Tommy series might ultimately have been a catalyst in this; such an obvious hack-job that redressing the balance seemed necessary. A candid, heartfelt documentary for Netflix certainly helped. Completing the comeback – and earning her place – is her work here in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, where she gets the perfect, self-reflective role to prove herself. One can sense Anderson channeling her heroes – Gena Rowlands, Barbara Loden – and coming up with something honest, brittle and commanding. The pull-quotes call it ‘the role of a lifetime’. For once the pull-quotes might be right.

Anderson is Shelly, 57-year-old Las Vegas lifer in a now-antiquated show called Le Razzle Dazzle, which is being closed down after a near 40-year run, likely leaving its longest running star adrift. We follow her life over the show’s closing two weeks, taking in her relationship to a handful of close coworkers, and testing the waters of a cagy reunion with her adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), whom she lost custody of years prior.

Coppola’s last feature – the Andrew Garfield misfire Mainstream – tackled a particularly modern compulsion for celebrity with tacky blunt-force blows. The Last Showgirl comes at fame from the other end. What happens when those 15 minutes run out. And while Shelly’s level of notoriety mostly exists in her head, the ramifications of leaving the stage are as real as though she were Vegas’ prima act. Living paycheck to paycheck (and struggling with those), one gains a great sense of worry for Shelly’s financial future, suggestive of a culture built on the exploitation and suppression of it’s greatest assets.

Coppola’s aesthetic choices bring to mind another depiction of a seasoned pro fighting against failure; Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. The two pictures could be seen as gendered reflections of one another. The Last Showgirl is captured on handheld 35mm, often under-lit, grimy and happenstance. The shoot was a run’n’gun 18 days, and this sometimes announces itself via plentiful unfocused shots and a sense of slightly rushed blocking. The building blocks are sometimes a little clumsy or rote; meandering montages of Shelly wandering Vegas’ liminal spaces in search of a thought, or the selection of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for a tragic dance number – which only feels like a misstep because it’s so overused.

These are the only nitpicks, though, as in the main the impressive work of the cast raise The Last Showgirl to something acutely empathic and worthy of the esteemed legacies of Anderson’s heroes. Having watched Kiernan Shipka grow up on Mad Men, its arresting to see her mature into the actor she’s become. Appearing here as Shelly’s youthful reflection Jodie, it’s among her most accomplished performances so far. The heartaches in her life – feathered into the peripheries – are almost too tantalising. We want to know more. Dave Bautista is also on typically fine form as Le Razzle Dazzle‘s showrunner Eddie, adding another beautifully calibrated gentle giant to a streak of noteworthy supporting roles. Jamie Lee Curtis’ sunbed-scorched harridan Annette, meanwhile, is arguably the most tragic figure of all; an example of the blinkered hanger-on Shelly might become if she clings to the thrall of the casinos and cocktail bars.

This is character study as opposed to narrative-driven drama. A sliver of a life, not its scandalous fulcrum. The Last Showgirl contains itself to those two weeks as Le Razzle Dazzle closes out, ending on a kaleidoscope impression of the show and Shelly’s beaming eyes as she gives it her all one last time. Her fate is outside of the scope of Kate Gersten’s script, perhaps too sad to include. The portents are all there.

The Vegas show – tacky, tawdry and outmoded as it may be – is to Shelly a kind of Oz where one is transported for the brevity of a musical number. A place of sequins and sparkling lights, of feather boas and rhinestones, where an idea of beauty becomes – however fleetingly – a fantasy at a fingertip’s remove. She carries this idea of it with a naivety that borders on outright denial that her time is up. For those in their 20s clustered around her, there is no such fantasy. It’s a job, and a shitty one. Shelly is ‘The Last Showgirl’ not just for her age and experience but for being, it seems, the last one holding onto a vanishing ideal. Whether there’s any place in the modern world for that ideal is a question too galling, too worrisome for her.

Coppola’s film may be frustratingly imperfect at times, but it communicates such a specific feeling of a dream crumbling that I felt almost constantly moved by it, and particularly by the performances of Anderson, Shipka and Bautista. One wonders if Anderson might find credibility now, or whether the role is too intermingled with her own persona for people to see her potential outside of it. Is it too perfect for her? I hope that’s not the case, and she’s afforded the opportunities to show what else she can do. That The Last Showgirl can give to Anderson what it ultimately can’t quite allow Shelly (if only for the purposes of its forlorn poetry). That reality can best Coppola’s snapshot of a cruel, irreversible entertainment industry.