Pamela Anderson flexes her thespian chops in The Last Showgirl (2024)

I don’t want to get too hopeful, but it feels like there’s a sea-change of sorts afoot. Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, after Demi Moore in The Substance, has delivered a stunning performance that wouldn’t have been associated with her even a decade ago. I’m frankly over the moon for her. Between her accolades for her Broadway turn as Roxy Hart and her work here, it’s her turn, dammit.

Anderson, of course, is not an idiot. She’s shown self-awareness throughout her career and pivoted production almost 20 years ago. It would be a mistake to conflate her Baywatch image with the woman; but that she’s had the ability to bring a nuanced, layered performance like this to the screen is surprise. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and confess that I don’t think I’ve watched her work in a feature film since the very weird, silly Barb Wire. She was fine in it and was both playing on and kind of sending up her sexpot image, but I wouldn’t say it was Chekov. 

I’ve followed her animal rights activism and often been struck that she’s fine chat show raconteur. So again, it’s not a surprise that there’s more to her than her 90s image. I’m kind of harping on this because her work here is so damned good. That she has on equal footing with  Jamie Lee Curtis as a scene partner alone speaks to the quality of work she’s bringing here.

She plays Shelly, a senior member of an old-fashioned topless burlesque show in Las Vegas, whose career is facing twilight as the show itself is being replaced at the venue at which it’s been playing for decades. The younger members of the troupe are disappointed and one of them has already found a niche to land in at a sexier club, but Shelly really is the curator and mom of “The Razzle Dazzle” and it becomes apparent that the show has been her buoy in the tumult of life’s ocean for most of her life, seeing her through the birth and estrangement from her daughter (a remarkable Billie Lourd), and insulating her from the shifting tides of entertainment on the Strip. 

When lighting/stage director Eddie shows up at a girls night at Shelly’s to tell them the act is closing, the force of those changes lands like waves crashing on the shore. We see it earlier, from the first shot of Shelly at an audition where we see the lines on Anderson’s face etched by a life of denial and delusion, likely born of the need to insulate herself from life’s disappointment and the ravages of time, Over the course of the feature, which might be a little too short (running time is an hour and twenty-nine minutes), Shelly reveals a life of self-created myth, much of it stemming from the kind of errancy that can doom us when we’re younger or just plain don’t know what to do or lack the sense to have a fall-back plan. 

Anderson is in every frame, and she’s fascinating. Her past catches up to her as she’s brought face to face with bad decisions and naivety. Shelly’s basically really sweet, but she hasn’t been out in the world as much as she lets on. Her advice to her daughter Hannah that the pursuit of art is more important than working in a job you hate is fine, but it’s undermined when we later find that Shelly would leave the young Hannah in the car with a Game Boy while she did two shows a night because she couldn’t afford a sitter. When Eddy raises the question of why she didn’t take other jobs or shifts where she could be with Hannah, Shelly reacts with venom. Again, Anderson’s face says as much as her dialog. 

She knows she could have/should have done this or that, but she seems to have genuinely believed that she was and is an artist, sacrificing all for her art. By the time Eddie has gently tried to ask these questions, you can already feel how out of her depth Shelly must have felt as a young girl with a child. Additionally, she does have a genuine bone to pick with Eddie; he’s Hannah’s father. Unacknowledged because, as he said, they didn’t really have a relationship.

That might be the other tell that Shelly’s story is more than a little average; Annette, her best friend and the only person she listens to without being defensive, tells Shelly that her choice in men has been somewhat ill-advised. That said, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis gives us another great performance; her Annette is a fully realized woman, someone you know or have met) is herself stuck by her past, though in her case, it’s paying for a gambling addiction. 

The beauty of this is that neither woman is presented as an object of derision or mockery, let alone judgement by Gia Copplola’s compassionate direction which helps fill out Kate Gersten’s screenplay, which does stumble in in a couple of melodramatic hiccups and suffers a little from sketching characters more than evoking them, though this may be moot; the performances all around are notable.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t pause for a moment to single out Dave Bautista for turning in a sensitive reading on Eddie. Bautista has been quietly racking up wonderful supporting gigs for a while now, and I can’t be alone in hoping to see him carry a film. He brands a lived-in sense of caring and experience with life’s disappointments here, particularly when he’s talking to Shelly. The two. Younger principles of The Razzle Dazzle, Mary=Ann (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) are ballasts of reality to Shelly’s insularity. Both also bear the brunt of Shelly’s off-note selfishness. 

There’s a scene where Jodie calls on Shelly for moral support which just seems too shoehorned in to move the plot along to the next beat at Shelly’s expense. It reinforces her delusion on the one hand, but it does a disservice to the character, whose demeanor is so vulnerable and open that it rings false when she Shute Jodie out, particularly after the scene follows an equally not-so-convincing falling out with Hannah. 

Likewise, there’s a moment with Mary-Ann that seems to come out of nowhere; it falls flat because we know that Shelly just isn’t that childish.I suppose Gersten is making the case that Shelly is still that immature, but at fifty-seven, it seems unlikely and given wheat we’ve seen of Shelly, highly unlikely. These moments aside, both Song and Shipka bring a fullness to their characters that overcomes any deficiencies in the writing.

I do give Gersten a lot of credit, though, overall. She honed her craft as executive story editor for both Mozart in the Jungle and The Good Place, and there’s a genuine sense of finding the underlying decency of persons as opposed to merely trying to render sympathetic characters (that’s accomplished with flair and without sentiment, though just barely). It’s Coppola’s direction that keeps the film together when those lapses mentioned early threaten to derail the sensitivity and structure of the film. 

Her direction is ably supported by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography. She’s worked with Coppola extensively and has an astute eye for color and lighting that lends a pop-confectionary feel to Shelly’s p.o.v., which is necessary, particularly when the camera lingers on a false eyelash and dab of cold cream in a sink or when we see Shelly and Annette, backs to the camera, facing the Las Vegas cityscape from a parking garage; the artifice of the city mirrors the artifice of the revue.

Shelly’s reflections on The Razzle Dazzle as the last show of its kind and as a descendant of nineteenth century burlesque Lido culture is alluring at first, until we hear its deconstruction (or just plain destruction) as a shoddy nudie revue by her daughter or how irrelevant both Jodie and Mary-Ann find the show (it’s a just a job to each of them, but they both love Shelly, and it’s really not hard to see why).

When Eddie, at one point, quietly regards Shelly after she’s had a particularly trying moment and says that she really is a legend, you heart quietly breaks. To be sure, your hear may quietly break throughout the film. 

At the end, what we have is a quiet mediation on the passage of time, the delusions we all kind of tell ourselves, very often just trying to stay afloat, and how women are aged out of their fields despite their experience or what they have to offer. Thankfully, in this case, for Pamela Anderson, her second act looks like it’s just beginning.