“The Last Showgirl” Movie Review – Spotlight Report
In what seems like a growing genre of films about ageing starlets hitting the skids, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl takes the slice-of-life approach to uncomfortable effect.
Shelly (Pamela Anderson) has been the lead in a Las Vegas dance show for over thirty years when it finally gets cancelled. Unsure what to do with her life and facing unemployed destitution, she is forced to take stock of a series of poor decisions she’s made.
There is a real tragedy to Shelly’s story that makes it a hard watch. Shelly is – to put it mildly – not bright and has been thoroughly seduced by the glamour of being in the spotlight. At every turn Shelly reacts with hostility to anyone who threatens her reality. Holding onto an image of herself as the show’s poster girl during her prime in the 1980s, she has delusions of grandeur that her younger, more grounded colleagues politely indulge until she wears out her welcome. She is visited by her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), but cannot mend the wounds left by years of neglect. Her friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) thinks she’ll be able to work until she dies but doesn’t realise the business itself is dying. Her younger colleagues (Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song) are seeking work in strip clubs and Shelly treats them with contempt for it. She considers starting a relationship with her stage manager (Dave Bautista) but is rebuffed. In a telling moment, she’s asked why she never got a job working at a grocery store to accommodate her daughter’s needs instead of working at night, revealing that she’s only ever earned as much as a checkout girl with none of the benefits of conventional employment and it’s ultimately all been for the slim prestige of being the lead in a tawdry show nobody cares about.
Working with a shockingly tiny budget, The Last Showgirl was shot on 16mm film with a worn, faded, grainy look that suits the material, and an excellent score by Andrew Wyatt that sounds like snatches of dated glamour music. Las Vegas is Hollywood’s frequent choice of location to analogise its cruel cycle of fame, and The Last Showgirl is clearly having a go at Hollywood’s tendency to discard older actresses. Although, it must be said that Hollywood also keeps congratulating itself for making movies about that tendency that feature resurrected older actresses. Luckily, as with The Substance‘s Demi Moore revival, Pamela Anderson acquits herself well here, with a spectacularly brittle performance that leans hard into her image as a bimbo. We’ll know this trend is truly eating its own tail when Elizabeth Berkley gets dragged back out to squeeze our tear ducts.
If there’s any drawback to The Last Showgirl , it’s that despite being only 85 minutes long it feels like hours. It’s a film that can be strongly recommended, but is almost certainly not something you’d want to watch more than once.
