“Why must a movie be ‘good?’ Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?”
That 19-word tweet from Mike Ginn is one of the most concisely insightful pieces of critical writing on cinema in the past decade. It’s also never been so strenuously tested since it was first tweeted in 2018 as it is in Gia Coppola’s latest feature, The Last Showgirl, which relies heavily on the simple pleasure of seeing Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face, huge. The Last Showgirl is not a Good Movie in an artistic sense, or it’s at least too phony & hollow to pass as a well-constructed drama. It’s got a nice visual texture to it, though, which helps make it an effective advertisement for Anderson’s reinvented screen presence as an anxious, fragile Betty Boop. Anderson stars in the film as a traditional Las Vegas showgirl who’s aging out of her decades-long stage act, echoing her real-life career as The 90s Babe who was quietly forgotten after the end of her signature decade. She’s overly delicate & vulnerable here in a way we’ve never seen her in more youthful, forceful titles like Baywatch & Barb-Wire, which is a great benefit to the movie, since it otherwise only shows us things we’ve seen before. If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler or any post-Starlet title from Sean Baker, you’ve already seen The Last Showgirl done better. You just haven’t seen it with Pamela Anderson’s beautiful face on the screen & poster.
Even so, The Last Showgirl doesn’t do entirely right by Anderson, since it allows her more forceful costars to steamroll her daintily sweet performance whenever they want the spotlight. Jamie Lee Curtis is the guiltiest of her scene partners in that respect, playing a too-old-for-this-shit cocktail waitress who still stubbornly carries the self-assured boldness that Anderson left behind in the 90s. Dave Bautista is innocent as the only male member of the central cast and the only costar who tones himself down to match her low-key volatility. Meanwhile, the three actresses that she takes under her wing as daughter figures, only one biological (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd), each hungrily scrape for single-scene impact that will allow them to stand out in a movie built entirely around an already-famous actor’s persona. The result is a long procession of phony interactions that feel like out-of-context scenes from a longer movie where these personal relationships actually mean something to the audience beyond an acting showcase. The important thing, though, is that Pamela Anderson gets to model gorgeously tacky Vegas showgirl outfits while either whispering or screeching dialogue that no one would have dared to feed her when she was a 20something sexpot. It’s an audition for a better movie that can make full use of what she has to offer, now that we know it’s on the table.
There isn’t much of a story to speak of here, just fragments of one that gradually unravel and dissolve. At the start of the film, Anderson’s titular showgirl is given two-weeks’ notice that her decades-running show of employment, Le Razzle Dazzle, is being closed to make room for more exciting, novel acts. She’s distraught by this professional blow, not only because she’s unlikely to find new stage work but also because no one around her seems especially nostalgic for what’s being lost. Everyone from her fellow dancers (Shipka, Song), her estranged daughter (Lourd), her romantic-interest stage manager (Bautista), and her cocktail-waitress bestie (Curtis) all see Le Razzle Dazzle as just another tits-and-glitter show – a way to pay the bills. In her mind and, presumably, the audience’s, it’s more substantial than that. It’s a moving work of visual art and a relic of Old Vegas kitsch, which Anderson’s showgirl likens to Parisian traditions like shows at The Crazy Horse. That’s a great starting place for a film, but Coppola never finds the way to develop her premise into a plot. Individual scenes from those two depressing weeks in the showgirl’s life clash against each other in gentle, splashing waves, then the whole movie just recedes away from the audience in a low tide, leaving us dry. Of course, though, just because it isn’t any good doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing Pamela Anderson’s face in it, huge.
-Brandon Ledet
