‘The Last Showgirl’ review: Pamela Anderson leads a shattering ensemble as an aging burlesque entertainer

Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a spellbinding film about aging, made with tremendous texture and soul. The wistful Vegas drama follows a fifty-something burlesque dancer in her career twilight, played by ’90s sex symbol Pamela Anderson — her ostensible comeback role. It’s one of just several strokes of smart meta-textual casting, resulting in an ensemble that grounds the movie’s visual chaos in distinctly human melodies.

At a mere 85 minutes in length, it zips by in the blink of an eye. However, it remains so captivating that by the time the credits roll, the film practically embodies the sensation of looking back at one’s life and wondering where all that time went. It’s a story steeped in regret, but one that reckons with past mistakes as a common, perhaps even necessary experience, especially the life of an artist.

What is The Last Showgirl about?

Credit: Roadside Attractions

The Last Showgirl opens on Shelly (Anderson) about to audition with a provocative dance routine, as she lowers the brim of her bedazzled police hat and lies about her age (she claims to be 36). The camera remains tethered to her hesitant expression, awash in spotlight and surrounded by the darkness of an empty stage as though she were unmoored from time and space, and up against not just some phantom director but the entire world. When and where this brief framing scene occurs is irrelevant, at least at first. It comes back around eventually, but here, it serves as a gateway into the character’s dueling self-doubt and persistence before the movie begins in earnest.

The movie’s world — its chintzy glitz and glamor — comes pouring through the screen all at once as we enter Shelly’s daily routine in a lengthy, propulsive take backstage at her nightly job as a showgirl, at the low-rent Vegas revue Le Razzle Dazzle. She and several younger dancers pour in and out of their collective dressing room to make quick costume changes. It’s brisk but humdrum, a mechanical energy the movie immediately punctuates with overlapping dialogue that gets lost in the shuffle. Much of it, however, is delivered by Shelly.

During scenes like these, Shelly either complains, reminisces, or rambles, and is looked upon by her novice peers with both adoration and saintly patience. They love her. They put up with her. She’s a mother figure who’s been at this job since the ’80s, so she knows the ropes, but she has an inflated opinion of what she does — or at least, that’s how she frames it to other people, if only to convince herself that her lifelong sacrifices have been worthwhile.

After hours (which is to say, during the day), she usually catches up with her work friends, including former burlesque co-dancer Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), now a waitress at a casino. During one fine off-the-clock hangout, she’s joined by two of the younger showgirls, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), as well as Le Razzle Dazzle‘s curt stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), who comes bearing bad news about the revue’s future.

This gathering not only illuminates the ensemble’s delightful interpersonal dynamics, but it creates a domino effect through which we, the audience, learn more about each character as the film goes on, since they’re forced to reckon with their respective prospects. In the case of Shelly, she decides to check up on her estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), a fraught relationship whose fissures seem to grow deeper each time the mother-daughter duo interacts.

With the show’s closure looming, the characters’ pasts and futures begin to fade into focus. It essentially becomes a point of crisis, given how the revue (and their collective camaraderie) have formed a fragile new normal for them to take shelter from whatever they’re each escaping. With that normalcy threatened, they’re left with little choice but to reflect on what their lives might become without this temporary safety net, leading to a film whose plot is unmoving on paper, but whose underlying anxieties and ruminations are gently expressed through the dazzling aesthetic flourishes, as Coppola presents alluring portraits of women at pivotal moments in their careers. 

The Last Showgirl is visually stunning.

Credit: Roadside Attractions

After her middling debut Palo Alto and her disastrous sophomore effort Mainstream, Gia Coppola has levelled up with The Last Showgirl in a way few American directors have — at least not since her grandfather followed up Finian’s Rainbow with acclaimed New Hollywood breakthrough The Rain People, and soon after, with The Godfather. The film is immediately captivating, thanks in no small part to Loki cinematographer (and longtime Gia Coppola collaborator) Autumn Durald Arkapaw, whose images aren’t just sensational but sensory, weaving thoughts, dreams, and memories into the frame’s very shape and texture.

The movie’s use of 16mm celluloid yields film grain that dances, especially in low-lit interiors and against the backdrop of Vegas’ bright neon signs, making the movie feel alive whenever the characters are captured in close quarters. The flaws in the film stock don’t just feel like artifacts but gemstones, akin to the ones sewn into the showgirls’ clothes. It’s as if they were at one with the picture, or we were viewing them not as objects on the other side of a lens but as elements within the lens itself, bringing them closer to our gaze.

Coppola makes the intriguing story decision to omit the characters’ actual dance performances for much of the runtime. In seldom revealing them on screen, she prevents the casting of judgement (by the camera, or by the audience) on what they do until she can ensure just the right circumstances in which to present them on stage — the right emotional context, once the movie’s drama has dispensed with every possible argument about what Le Razzle Dazzle is or isn’t. Is it a job between jobs? A cheap nudie show? Or something refined, descended from Parisian artistic tradition? It depends on who you ask — Shelly believes it’s the latter — but all these opinions and more end up colliding when the show is finally revealed, and “what” it is pales in comparison to what it means to each dancer.

In the meantime, the frame dances and sways to capture their movements through cramped spaces like narrow backstage corridors and solo rehearsals, but this isn’t just achieved through the camera’s physical motion. The lenses themselves — anamorphic Ultra Panatar — curve the plane of focus, warping and wobbling as the camera pans. They provide distinct blurs around the edges of the frame, not unlike the painterly flourishes Roger Deakins brought to the modern Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Here, Coppola’s Wild West is the heightened cultural un-reality of the Las Vegas strip with its fake Eiffel Towers and the like. It’s the last frontier of possibility, after which it feels like someone can travel (or fall) no further.

No matter where the characters turn for help — be it financial or emotional — they’re all up against a wall, just as the idealism of showbiz cast in the city’s bright lights is constantly confronted by its façade. These dueling realities and artificialities are also embodied by the movie’s impeccable cast, on multiple narrative levels. The actors deliver immensely thoughtful work, and Coppola, in casting each performer in their respective parts, pulls something fundamental from them too, using their star power to magnify her narrative tenfold.

Pamela Anderson leads an incredible ensemble.

Credit: Roadside Attractions

Anderson, having once been a near-ubiquitous celebrity, feels like the most overt and obvious of the movie’s tongue-in-cheek casting choices, but this doesn’t mean she’s ineffective. On the contrary. Her life as a woman in the spotlight, someone who’s been both elevated and embarrassed by it, seems to inform her relationship to the camera, and  how much she opens up and closes herself off to it at any given moment. But make no mistake: This isn’t a case of Anderson playing a version of herself. Shelly is a richly formed, often rankled, frazzled character, whose constant verbal diarrhea may as well be a symptom of insecurity.

This year, The Substance was lauded for its depictions of aging women in entertainment, and while its various genre metaphors were too scattered to be coherent, Demi Moore’s role (and her private, vulnerable moments) left an impact. For instance, the moment in which Moore’s character furiously wipes off her lipstick before a date and decides to stay home. Anderson belongs in that same conversation, for the sustained manner in which she lives in that exact mode of self-loathing, constantly on the precipice of breakdown. What’s more, upon crossing that threshold, Shelly’s vulnerabilities are distinctly ugly. Her breakdowns make her deeply unpleasant to those around her, especially her friends, making Anderson’s performance all the more stunning in its honesty.

Each supporting character is cast with a similar eye for real-world experience too. Curtis, a long-time entertainer and “final girl” progenitor — once defined by her youthful innocence — found recent Oscar success as a wildly different character in Everything Everywhere All At Once: a frumpy, pouty old woman who couldn’t seem to find happiness. And yet, in nailing that role, she appears to have found a comfortable new niche, making her appearance here as someone who has escaped the life of a showgirl feel oddly radical, if only because she plays a woman who, on some level, misses being the center of attention. Does being a cocktail waitress come with more dignity? Perhaps on occasion, but she still lives and works at the mercy of a misogynistic Vergas entertainment industry that can — and in the movie’s case, does — turn on her on a dime.

Coppola similarly casts former child stars Song and Shipka (of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Mad Men fame, respectively) as young performers whose bodies are constantly on full display. Song’s character, Mary-Anne, is a mediator of sorts, and often tells things like it is whenever Shelly rambles too long, while Shipka’s Jodie is much more of a quiet observer, though in her own vulnerable moments, she feels (and fears) quite deeply. Both end up at the mercy of how interchangeably and disposable they’re viewed by the world of live entertainment. Jodie especially feels the isolating brunt of being a young entertainer, in her subplot of being rejected by loved ones and searching for a maternal substitute in Shelly.

Shelly, meanwhile, is preoccupied with trying to win back Hannah, whose bitter rejections pierce and hurt Shelly’s sense of self and femininity. Hannah looks down on what her mother does, but her anger comes from a place of abandonment. For Lourd, whose own mother was a huge part of show business — Carrie Fisher of Star Wars fame — being the daughter of an entertainer and struggling to comprehend both her mother’s desires and her sacrifices feels equally charming and challenging, a wink at the audience that also pushes the actress to uncomfortably bitter places with her accusations.

Credit: Roadside Attractions

However, perhaps the movie’s sharpest commentary alongside casting Anderson is Bautista’s role as Eddie, the awkward, soft-spoken producer with a flowing mane; he looks out for Shelly and the other showgirls, though he’s separated from them socially and structurally. He’s afforded relative safety despite the show’s potential closure, the way people in more traditional jobs might be (compared to most entertainers), and as a man, he isn’t necessarily exposed to the same rigorous judgements as his female counterparts. Eddie is someone who seems to quietly understand all this, despite occasionally putting his foot in his mouth. 

Bautista brings not only an engaged thoughtfulness to the role, through sensitive eyes that seem to want to reach out to those in pain, but he brings the baggage of his past life as a wrestler too, a former WWE headliner whose own body (and bodily changes) have been the topic of media conversation. Having similarly had a physically demanding job with an expiration date — and one with all the camp and showiness of Le Razzle Dazzle — simply placing the actor in this environment creates a relationship to it for the audience, one Bautista seizes upon through stray and wordless glances.

As all these warring perspectives collide, Shelly is pushed slowly over the brink, as Anderson portrays a woman outliving her perceived usefulness — as a mother, as a friend, and as a physical entertainer whose youth and agility are paramount. The more The Last Showgirl goes on, the more it feels like she’s been covering up deep wounds with constant, nonsensical conversation, to the point that she can no longer honestly express herself without exploding. It’s a masterclass in naturalistic performance, as Anderson dives into some of the heaviest emotional material of any actress this year — perhaps alongside Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths — creating meaning out of lifelong pain, while teetering on the edge of obsolescence.

The Last Showgirl opens Dec. 13 in Los Angeles, and nationwide Jan. 10.