The former Baywatch star comes into her own in Gia Coppola’s latest, musing on late-career artistry, passionate craft and female aging.
★★★☆☆
Pamela Anderson is a recognisable name to most. Whether or not you’ve watched a single episode of Baywatch, her sex-symbol status is well documented and referenced throughout pop culture. After years out of the public eye, her biography is starkly relevant for a film about an aging performer dealing with an industry moving on to something newer and younger.
Shelley (Anderson), Marianne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) are all dancers at Las Vegas revue ‘The Razzle Dazzle’. The dancers range across generations, but they’re all in the same situation when it’s suddenly announced that the show is closing. They consider what they have sacrificed for this dying industry and what it has given back to them.
The Last Showgirl succeeds when it puts its characters and their relationships at the forefront. The group have created a family out of their work, the performers joined by producer Eddie (Dave Bautista) and former dancer Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis). The cast has chemistry in spades, their history and connections are palpable. An example of this plays out in a scene set in Shelley’s home involving the dancers (and Annette) cooking food together while bantering each other about their interactions with men, ranging from confident to jokingly self-aware about their ageing selves, until Eddie turns up and the energy is sucked out of the home.
Scenes are filmed in a Cassavettes-esque, fly-on-the-wall manner, with both the Vegas vibrancy and the grit behind it captured on colourful 16mm film.
Anderson is impressive as Shelley in a performance which stays raw and human for most of the runtime, refusing to fall into cliche. She is inspired to reconnect with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) as she contemplates what her life could’ve been without the Razzle Dazzle. Once again, with director Gia Coppola’s performance-forward approach, Anderson and Lourd completely sell this mother-daughter connection. They don’t always have the most explosive interactions, but every word is tinged with history and tamped-down emotions. These performances and directorial choices allow the film’s themes of motherhood, ageing and beauty standards to become personable and about the characters’ world rather than a statement to the audience
While performances and direction are commendable, the screenplay is unfortunately lacking, often feeling unable to poke past the story’s surface. Although the film purports to be a real internal exploration of Shelley’s situation, nothing we learn about her isn’t said outright in contextual dialogue. Ending up with a film that feels like it trusts its audience more than it actually does, as the visuals are used to gain context about the spaces Shelley inhabits, and the suburban home she seems to barely keep up with payments on. Still, none of what we learn tells us much about her as a character because the screenplay doesn’t seem to be giving as much to us as Gia Coppola’s direction, making this film feel like it’s scratching a surface instead of delving deeper.
The film is beyond serviceable and a good character drama purely off its performances and direction, which uses its framework to not only explore the artistry in something which can seem superficial. With the influx of Barbies, Poor Things and The Substances, themes of motherhood, ageing and beauty standards aren’t new territory, but they are uniquely explored especially with Pamela Anderson’s role serving as meta-commentary.
The Verdict
The Last Showgirl follows the emotions surrounding the end of an era and a movement, but as invigorating as the film is at its 85-minute runtime audiences may feel like there are still too many unknowns by the end of the story.
Words by Ellis Lamai
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