"The Last Showgirl" Review

If it seems like the world has gone crazier than usual in recent years, let's add to the fun with a phrase even less plausible than "Super Bowl Champion Detroit Lions": Pamela Anderson gives an Oscar-worthy performance in The Last Showgirl.

 No, I'm not kidding.

Anderson stars as Shelly Gardner, a....let's go with "mature" veteran of Le Razzle Dazzle, the last old-school Vegas revue show on the Strip. She's been with the show over 30 years and serves as a den mother to younger members Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, Dollface). Shelly truly believes in the show and what it represents while the girls just view it as a job, earning constant chiding from Shelly who doesn't care for the hyper-sexualized shows (a la Showgirls) or more spectacle-oriented presentations from Cirque de Soleil which have taken over Sin City.

However, all good things come to an end as stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista sporting long hair for the first time I can recall) announces that due to dwindling attendance, the casino management has decided to shutter Le Razzle Dazzle in favor of the "Dirty Circus" show which has already taken the prime nights in the showroom. The last performance will be in two weeks and the youngsters start going out for auditions.

Amidst this upheaval arrives Hannah (Billie Lourd, Scream Queens), Shelly's estranged daughter who doesn't respect her mother's life choices, complaining about how Shelly would leave her in the car with a GameBoy while she did two shows a night. She lived with family friends most of the time and is now a college student nearing graduation which is news to Shelly who gets her age wrong and asks if she's chosen a major.

On the other side of showgirling is Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, leaning waaaay too hard into her current "I'm over 60 and going to be fat" shtick; have your True Lies and Trading Places scenes cued up as eye bleach), who left the show several years previously and is now a cocktail waitress struggling for shifts against younger women. Shelly's attempt at auditioning reveals that beyond her age (57), her chops aren't that great and she had coasted on youth and looks.

The terrific and sadly departed singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl had a song called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" with lyrics that include:

She was a party girl, stayed up 'til the small hours
Now she's embarrassing and everybody laughs
At the girl with the face that could drive her baby wild
Now wasn't she the child with everything?

You should have seen her with her head held high
Now what do pretty girls do?
She used to be the same as me or you
Now what do pretty girls do?

Well they get older just like everybody else
She never thought she'd have to take care of herself

 The theme of what happens to attractive women as they age is a hot topic in the culture now especially with the wildly overrated The Substance likely to earn Demi Moore a Best Actress Oscar at age 62 for her gutsy full monty performance which has elevated her profile into Serious Actress territory after over 40 years in the business.

Anderson, to be kind, was starting in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement of regard for her thespian abilities. Whether it's her Playboy centerfold origins to being a Baywatch beauty to her tabloid infamy as half of the couple that put the term "sex tape" into common vernacular with then-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, to her quickie marriage/divorce to Kid Rock, or the fact that her big attempt at crossing over the big screen from the boob tube (pun definitely intended) was 1996's Barb Wire, a movie only remembered (if that) for its credits where she dances around while being hosed down to a rocked-up cover of "Word Up" (very NSFW video), when she started going out in public without makeup, it was easy to see it as a cheap ploy to be taken seriously when "looking old" is a common gambit along with "imitating real people" or "get fat/ugly" to win gold.

Except here it serves a legitimately good performance, all the more shocking because there was NOTHING in the previous 35 years of ubiquitous fame hinting at the possibility of such a turn from her. She imbues Shelly with notes of pathos and naivete as someone who so devoted herself to the show that she cocooned herself from reality nor thought it could ever end. If suggesting to factory workers whose jobs were exported to the other side of the world that they "learn to code" seems glib and unrealistic if they were approaching retirement age, what's the career path for a AARP-eligible Vegas showgirl?

But Shelly isn't a passive victim here, she's responsible for her choices whether in not raising her daughter or preparing for the inevitable. And her lack of empathy at times is illustrated when one of the girls shows up at her place, upset that she may never be able to return home and Shelly blows her off because she doesn't want to make time for her. Anderson doesn't try to make Shelly into a porcelain doll and it's a brave choice which, while the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild nominated her and Curtis for, the Oscars snubbed her in favor of a man and virtue signalling. Of all the actresses who got shafted this year - Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Lily-Rose Depp - Anderson has the greatest right to feel ignored

The rest of the cast turns in good work ranging from Shipka's naive 19-year-old to Curtis's sun-baked senior citizen. (She looks like Lin Shaye's character in There's Something About Mary.) The only poor fit is Lourd who is a decade older than her role and looks it.

Director Gia Coppola (yes, of the Nepo Baby factory Coppola family; the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola) directs Kate Gersten's screenplay with a gritty style that mashes up semi-documentary realism with dreamy interludes of Shelly gazing at the Vegas skyline, the part that doesn't get seen in the movies. There is also a weird montage featuring a drunk Annette dancing on a platform that's a little too surreal.

The look of Autumn Cheyenne Durald Arkapaw's (Black Panther: Wakada Forever) cinematography, achieved by shooting on Super 16mm film with wild anamorphic lenses takes some getting used to as everything towards the sides of the frame is out-of-focus and distorted. (If I wasn't watching on a S-tier OLED TV, I'd complain to the projectionist.)

 It's hard to tell whether The Last Showgirl will propel Anderson into a late-life career as an actual actress exhibiting range or this is just a one-off moment where the multiverse glitched and we glimpsed something previously unimaginable, but if you're into small indie character dramas with decent writing and good performances you should catch this show before it closes.

Score: 6/10.  Catch it on cable/streaming.