The Last Showgirl
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
Stars: Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Billie Lourd, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista
Writer: Kate Gersten
Director: Gia Coppola
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
It seems cosmically fitting that The Last Showgirl — a drama about the final days of a topless Las Vegas Lido extravaganza — is a breakthrough vehicle for a veteran actress whose entire quarter-century career has, until now, been defined largely by her youthful sexiness.
In a career spanning five decades, Pamela Anderson seemed to glory in her sexpot image, from her days as the Tool Time Girl on the sitcom Home Improvement to her 110 episodes bouncing along the beach on Baywatch to her tenure as a famous-for-being-famous reality TV star.
Now, at 57, it turns out that Anderson’s entire career was just research for this, a role she was born to play and which she plays the hell out of: Shelly, the 50-something one-time centerpiece of Le Razzle Dazzle, an old-fashioned, Rat Pack-friendly girly spectacular at some unnamed Strip casino. Shelly, who has been in the show almost from the beginning of its 39-year run, is a living legend — albeit one who for the past few decades has been pushed farther and farther back in the chorus line. Gallingly, it is her youthful, sequined self who is still pictured on the show’s billboards.
Now the show is closing. Shelly, who went AWOL from the childhood of her estranged and now-grown daughter Hannah (American Horror Story’s Billie Lourd) to pursue her glittery ambitions, is now left to try and figure out if she was part of a vanishing grand art form, or if she simply threw her life away pursuing the most empty of dreams.
It’s easy to see how Shelly’s daughter calculates the answer to that equation: Bitter and resentful, even as Hannah approaches middle age she has never once set foot in the theater where her mother has balanced herself between stiletto heels and feathered caps for most of her life. During one of the few mother-daughter conversations that don’t devolve into shouting, Shelly implores Hannah to sit in that audience just once before Le Razzle Dazzle — the show that defined Shelley both as a showgirl and a mother — shutters forever.
Absent the daughter she neglected, Shelly lives at the center of a rhinestone galaxy populated by dancers who treat her like a mother hen — albeit a somewhat ruffled one. Standing on a Vegas rooftop, watching darkness spread across the valley as the sun is also setting on their doomed stage show, Shelly relates the long story of her career trajectory — struggle to stardom to steep decline — to Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), a young colleague who, unlike Shelly, has always seen Le Razzle Dazzle as nothing more than a career pitstop.
Trying to cheer her mentor, Jodie points out that Shelly had once been the featured dance soloist in the show’s big production number, based on the Hindenburg disaster (screenwriter Kate Gersten based her script on the long-running Vegas show Jubilee!, which recreated the sinking of the Titanic every night for 35 years).
Yes, Shelly mournfully replies, but after a decade in the role she was replaced by a younger dancer. And that was more than 20 years ago.
While Shelly seems to gain some satisfaction from playing elder stateswoman to the younger dancers, she remains so utterly self-absorbed that, when they come to her for actual advice or emotional support, she abruptly — and sometimes cruelly — turns them away. Shelly appears to attribute her casual rejection of others — including her daughter — to their failure to recognize the showgirl life as the continuation of a tradition tracing back to the grand stage shows of 19th century Paris. She’s not simply a showgirl, Shelly insists: She’s an artist. The only trouble is, almost no one agrees with her; not even her fellow showgirls.
The cunning accomplishment in Anderson’s performance is in keeping us wondering just how much of Shelly’s assertion of high art is genuine and how much is self-protective bluster. It’s clear Shelly’s true ambition is to be seen — a profoundly human need — yet her great frustration comes from being unable to dictate precisely how the world sees her. It’s hard to imagine a movie role more lived-in than Anderson’s Shelly. She slips into the part with a sad shrug; One moment glammed to the nines, the next puffy-eyed in a schlumpy sweatshirt, ruefully acknowledging the transient nature of classic beauty, even from one moment to the next.
While Anderson’s Shelly relentlessly tries to project class and glamor in her steadily diminishing career, her best friend Annette — played with cantankerous clarity by Jamie Lee Curtis — assumes a tragically clear-eyed outlook. Overbaked in a tanning salon, seemingly mugged by her makeup box, barely fitting into the tacky cocktail waitress outfit she wears at a third-tier casino, Annette long ago stopped clinging to Shelley’s romanticized take on the showgirl scene. Curtis here continues her full-frontal attack on the stark realities of aging — as she has in TV’s The Bear and her Oscar-winning turn in Everything Everywhere All at Once — bringing a particularly painful kind of heartbreak to Annette. Sent home early from a shift to make way for a younger server, the quietly crushed Annette stops on the way out of the casino to mount the steps to a dancer’s platform, where she enacts some grotesquely out-of-practice choreography to the sound of Bonnie Raitt’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — a soundtrack that is clearly playing only inside her head. Clearly, Annette has surrendered to the tyranny of age, but she will not be taken its prisoner.
You don’t need a degree in literature to discern the broad theme that director Gia Coppola is getting at in The Last Showgirl. America’s enduring youth fetish, particularly when it comes to women, has been explored exhaustively in films old (All About Eve) and new (The Substance). What makes The Last Showgirl stand alone is the unique presence and brave performance by Anderson, whose showgirl life now brings her to a career crossroads, and a very public query of “What next?”
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