Certificate: TBC

Running Time: 85 mins

UK Distributor: TBC

UK Release Date: TBC

REVIEWED AT TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

WHO’S IN THE LAST SHOWGIRL?

Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Gia Coppola (director), Kate Gersten (writer), Natalie Farrey and Robert Schwartzman (producers), Andrew Wyatt (composer), Autumn Durald Arkapaw (cinematographer), Blair McClendon and Cam McLauchlin (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

An aging Las Vegas showgirl (Anderson) is faced with a crushing blow…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE LAST SHOWGIRL?

Everyone loves a comeback story, especially in Hollywood. Actors like Brendan Fraser, Robert Downey Jr. and Ke Huy Quan – all beloved when in their prime, but otherwise forgotten or self-destructive in later years – have seen recent success come their way in the form of vehicles designed to reintroduce them to general audiences, and more often than not they’ve generated awards glory and, more importantly, full-blown career revitalisation.

Pamela Anderson, the iconic Baywatch star and focus of a career-derailing sex-tape scandal with then-husband Tommy Lee, is the latest performer hoping to see a late-in-life resurgence in the limelight with her leading role in director Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, a film that was almost certainly designed to be Anderson’s equivalent of The Whale. However, Coppola’s film better resembles another Darren Aronofsky-directed project: The Wrestler, which similarly formed a strong comeback vehicle for Mickey Rourke, is all over this film’s DNA, making comparisons not only inevitable but genetically fused to its skin. This can make it difficult to see The Last Showgirl as its own product, or even as a particularly strong film outside of its noble intentions.

Anderson plays Shelley, a 50-something showgirl performing at a long-running revue in Las Vegas, where she has been comfortably positioned for the majority of her adult life. She has no qualms about her life, having formed close bonds with her fellow dancers Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song), as well as her gambler friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, under so much orange spray tan that she looks like a RuPaul’s Drag Race rendition of Donald Trump), though she is barely on good graces with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). However, Shelley’s world is shattered when the show’s producer Eddie (a soft-spoken Dave Bautista) informs her that the revue, which has seen low attendance in the modern age, is to be closed permanently, sending her into a state of grief for the life she sacrificed everything to live, and for what she must do with herself next.

The film’s main attraction, as often is the case with comeback vehicles like this, is the central performance of Pamela Anderson. Though never a particularly great actor, there is no doubt that she is pouring every little piece of her soul into this role, which I am fairly certain was not just specifically written for her, but in many ways is her. Like the character of Shelley, Anderson has spent most of her career defined by her good looks and “airhead” public persona, but now that she is at a certain point in her life where those things don’t really matter anymore, or at least as much as they did when she first came onto the scene, it’s abundantly clear that there isn’t much that anyone, least of all herself, can say about her beyond the glamour. It’s the kind of performance that Anderson probably didn’t need to do much prep for, because she has sadly lived through a lot of it herself, and through that she is able to deliver an admirably vulnerable turn that sees her play on the type of airy, Marilyn Monroe-esque figure that she is often typecast as, which makes the parallels between fiction and reality all the more apparent.

Sadly, this kind of give-it-all performance is perhaps better suited for a movie that ultimately isn’t as weightless or flaky in its execution. Gia Coppola, on her third film after Palo Alto and Mainstream, struggles to find much meat to chew on within Kate Gersten’s script, which often doesn’t dig that deep below the surface with a fairly one-note plot, and characters that aren’t given much space to feel fleshed out. It’s a surprisingly uneventful film, with the intent of course being to focus more on the main character’s unravelling as her life starts to crumble in front of her eyes, but outside of some awkward expository dialogue there isn’t really a moment where you understand why the main character is so fixated on her showbiz life, one that revolves around this one show. A show, by the way, that we are almost never shown being performed, and even when we do get glimpses, they are only ever just that. As a result, it’s much harder to see the main character’s point of view on a number of things, which ends up limiting your overall investment in the drama surrounding her.

Coppola attempts to mask the script’s wavy nature by inserting a large number of overly artistic montages, wherein characters wander about the Las Vegas Strip like they’re extras in a Terrence Malick movie. The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw certainly gives these sequences a fanciful dream-like quality, but they often feel randomly spliced in between actual scenes from the movie, leaving them to add or say next to nothing regarding the film’s drama. Though there will occasionally be an amusing interlude, such as one where Jamie Lee Curtis stands on a roulette table lip-synching to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, they mostly feel empty, and the sign that a filmmaker like Coppola is less confident about simply letting the plot or characters in this script speak for themselves.

It’s a shame that The Last Showgirl itself isn’t making as much of an effort as its lead actor clearly is. Pamela Anderson definitely deserves more respect in her field, especially after everything she’s been through, and she is no doubt fighting for it here as she gives the best performance of her career. Unfortunately, she’s not helped by a film that somehow feels a lot more superficial.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Last Showgirl is an attempted comeback vehicle for Pamela Anderson, who gives her best-ever performance in a film that sadly lacks the depth or sense of self-awareness that the actor is bringing by the bucketload.

It’s too early for cinema showtimes, but watch this space!