The Last Showgirl | 2024
Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl courtesy of Roadside Attractions
On paper, Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl seems like a perfect comeback vehicle for an actress like Pamela Anderson - an elegiac portrait of an aging showgirl facing the end of her career as her long running show on the Las Vegas strip is forced to close for good. Anderson, a model who's primarily known for her time on the TV show Baywatch in the 1990s, has often been used as a punchline, a living caricature of a "dumb blonde bombshell" stereotype, and a self-aware dramatic role like this could have been the perfect way to reclaim that narrative.
It is for that reason that I was rooting for The Last Showgirl, unfortunately I found the film, and Anderson's performance, to be surprisingly shallow. Set amongst the working class performers of the Vegas strip, the film attempts to examine the struggles of the background dancers and performers who are just struggling to make ends meet with no safety net or retirement plan in sight. Anderson's Shelley is past her prime, constantly nonplussed by the younger girls, desperately holding on to the fading glamor of a quickly changing entertainment milieu. With the closing of the show looming, Shelley has to make sense of her place in a world in which she no longer seems to have a place.
Coppola's aesthetic isn't unlike that of her aunt, Sofia. There's a dreamlike quality to the images, as Shelley wanders around the glittering concrete palaces of the strip, adrift and alone in a world that seems to have passed her by. The problem is that the film never really dives beneath those aesthetics. Having Anderson in this role is a perfect "art imitating life" moment, and the actress has publicly embraced a de-glammed persona by being frank about aging naturally, even doing late night talk show appearances sans makeup. How does a woman once recognized the world over for her beauty find her place in a world where youth and beauty is valued above all when her youthful looks begin to fade?
The Last Showgirl makes some feints toward those questions, but often feels all too content to remain a surface level exploration of its themes. Anderson remains frustratingly shallow as well, never really finding the depth beneath the ditzy exterior. For a film that is very pointedly about finding the humanity under the shallow showgirl façade, this is a death knell for the film. I kept waiting for her to go deeper, to let that façade crack and show us some range, but she never gets there. It's heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons because we can't help but root for her, but Coppola seems unable to coax something more out of her. That leaves the movie just as adrift as its lead character, unsure of what it is or what it wants to be - a pretty bauble that begs us to look beneath the surface while refusing to do so itself. Anderson, and the audience, deserves better.
