'The Last Showgirl' review: Yes, Pamela Anderson can act, and this movie proves it
Since the release of the schlocky and intermittently entertaining but cartoonish and campy Hulu series “Pam and Tommy” nearly three years ago, Pamela Anderson has made great strides to reclaim her identity and remind us that she’s an actual human being and not just a 1990s pinup/tabloid/punchline. In 2022, Anderson made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in “Chicago.” A year later, she released a second memoir, titled “Love, Pamela,” and she came across as a warm and engaging and self-deprecating presence in the Netflix documentary “Pamela, A Love Story.” When we see Anderson in public these days, it’s without makeup, looking natural and authentic.
Now comes Gia Coppola’s melancholic and beautifully sketched “The Last Showgirl,” and while it might sound like damning with faint praise to say this is the best performance for an actor who is known for the TV series “Baywatch” and the action stinker “Barb Wire,” I’ll say this as well: If I had never seen Pamela Anderson until her work here, I would have assumed she was a talented and seasoned character actor who was perfectly capable of carrying the heavy lifting of being the lead in a character-driven, dialogue-rich slice of Las Vegas life.
With a lean and poignant screenplay by Kate Gersten (based on her original play “Body of Work”) and a running time of just 85 minutes, this is a slight film with echoes of 1970s “small” classics such as “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” It’s not shocking or groundbreaking or attention-getting; it’s just consistently good at telling the story of a handful of characters who feel fully lived in and utterly real.
For the last 30 years, Anderson’s Shelly has been a dancer in "Le Razzle Dazzle," a feathered and topless revue reminiscent of the "Jubilee!" show that ran at Bally’s Las Vegas from 1981 to 2016. Shelly is proud of her work as an artist and she enjoys close friendships with an ad hoc family that includes younger dancers Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song); her best friend Annette (a scene-stealing Jamie Lee Curtis), who is a former showgirl turned world-weary, crappy-shift cocktail waitress, and the physically imposing but gentle Eddie (Dave Bautista), who produces the show and has to deliver the devastating news that it will be shutting down in two weeks.
Shelley goes into a bit of spiral. We see her standing in the shadow of the iconic Blue Angel Statue, with its wings that never fray, reminding us that Shelly’s winged costume will soon be a thing of the past. She struggles to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd, who has said elements of the story reminded her of her mother, Carrie Fisher, and grandmother, Debbie Reynolds).
Gia Coppola has a directing style more akin to that of her aunt, Sofia, than her grandfather, Francis, as she delivers one pitch-perfect sequence after another, never getting too flashy, never altering the natural path of the story with unexpected and unrealistic “movie moments.” This is one of those films that has us thinking about the characters and the lives they’ll have after the credits roll and hoping the best for all of them.