The Last Showgirl Review: Pamela Anderson Finally Gets Her Chance to Dazzle

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Pamela Anderson’s career has brought her great renown, which perhaps is just a polite way of saying great notoriety. Her fame rests, for the most part, on the lightweight beach hit Baywatch and her sex-tape scandal with rocker Tommy Lee. This latter incident served as the basis of an entertaining but less-than-reverent Hulu limited series, Pam & Tommy, which starred Lily James and Sebastian Stan.

The public is fond of Anderson — she’s a survivor, and a straight-shooter — but as an actress she’s never been taken seriously. Unlike Cher, she had no Silkwood, no Moonlight. Instead she had Barb Wire. A review of that 1996 action film described her as “the well-known pinup and conversation piece.” 

That attitude may finally change with The Last Showgirl, for which she’s earned a Screen Actors Guild nomination as best actress. Anderson’s sweetly touching performance as an aging-out Vegas dancer is rescued from pathos by the thinnest glimmer of hope and dignity — something like the shine of a gum wrapper’s foil. But both the hope and dignity feel hard-earned and authentic.

The film is a small but empathetic study of 57-year-old Shelly, whose decades-long employment in an act called Le Razzle Dazzle is unexpectedly coming to an abrupt end — a just-announced closing is days away. 

Shelly is distressed and completely baffled. She regards Razzle Dazzle as the epitome of sophistication, although anyone can can see it’s too dull to attract an audience. You’d have a hard time rounding up even dirty old men to fill the seats. But Shelly will still go on about the crudity of newer shows in town, insisting that Razzle Dazzle has an elegant French tone.

Perhaps she’s thinking of the Folies Bergère or the Moulin Rouge. Her reference point, unfortunately, should be Marie Antoinette in a tumbril, en route to the guillotine.

When Shelly auditions for a new show, its casting director (Jason Schwartzman) brutally dismisses her as a once-nubile no-talent, probably a never-talent. This is likely the truth, but Shelly is too cluelessly proud to believe him.

“I have no regrets,” she says. “None.” In her brave defense of her career — a career looked on with cool, puzzled dismissiveness by her estranged daughter (Billie Lourd) — and her determination to forge ahead,  she’s like a combination of Edith Piaf (a better example of French tone) and a leggier Ma Joad. 

But what will Shelly’s future be? She considers it a step down to become s cocktail waitress like her friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, orange-tanned and running herself ragged with desperate energy). She’s in great shape, certainly, and she can flash a smile wide and bright enough to be seen clear out in the Mojave Desert. Still, her days of glitter and sequins are going, going, gone, heading for the dark cavern where Siegfried, Roy and their tigers sleep for eternity. The more serious question is whether she’ll be losing her identity, as well.

The film ends with nothing really resolved, and no real understanding or explanation of why Shelly talks about being a showgirl as fervently as St. Therese of Liseux (one final French reference) prayed to be accepted into the Carmelites. It’s practically been a vocation for Shelly, her only ambition — she never even dreamed of being a Rockette. Instead, for decades she’s strapped on a pair of diaphanous wings and shimmered onto the stage, looking not so much like a butterfly as a moth dreaming of metamorphic glory. (The costumes are vintage designs created by Bob Mackie and Pete Menefee.) And this is all she ever wanted? Why?

There’s a sad blankness to Shelly, who speaks in a high, urgent voice and stares at everyone with a look of astonishment. She’s always a few beats behind, even more guileless than Elizabeth Berkley in 2005’s Showgirls, director Paul Verhoeven’s camp Vegas classic.

This opaqueness isn’t a flaw — if anything, more movies should resist explaining away the mysteries, however small, of their characters. It’s both a fantasy and a dramatic cop-out to pretend that a change in circumstances will always reveal startling new depths of character.

Director Mike Leigh’s superb new drama Hard Truths, for instance, is about an implacably difficult woman (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who blasts everyone in the vicinity with sarcastic abuse until she collapses into a profound depression. But the film gives us only a few clues about how she became who she is. (Or, rather, the film gives us just as much information as we need.)

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that Baptiste’s performance has an enigmatic resonance that director Gia Coppola hasn’t found in Anderson’s — the sense there’s a degree of existential mystery and meaning hidden behind an unliftable veil, Anderson acts with such plain, dedicated honesty she could be the star of a documentary.

But the performance, taken for what it is, is a critical breakthrough for her. In interviews she’s clearly thrilled with this sudden elevation in her status — she even did a spot for the prestigious Criterion film collection, talking about her passion for actress Jean Moreau and director Federico Fellini, and whimsically floating the idea that she’d love to star in a remake of Katharine Hepburn’s Summertime.

She’s no longer a mere showgirl. 

The Last Showgirl is in theaters now.

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