‘The Last Showgirl’ Would Like to Reintroduce You to Pamela Anderson

It’s weird to say that Pamela Anderson — All-Canadian girl next door, Baywatch MVP, animal-rights activist, author, and the No. 1 spokesperson for going makeup–free — is experiencing what folks have dubbed a comeback. Since she first showed up in the pages of Playboy and graced the sitcom Home Improvement, Anderson has gone through so many celebrity-culture cycles, seen so many career ups and downs, been labeled and pigeonholed and underestimated so many times. Yet she hasn’t needed to “come back” from anywhere. Anderson has merely skipped in and out of the spotlight’s glare, sometimes but not always of her own accord.

What is being sold on Anderson’s behalf right now is not a return. Rather, it’s a reinvention, and this is where The Last Showgirl comes in. The story of a Las Vegas dancer whose old-school show is set to have its final curtain call, Gia Coppola’s Sin City character study gives the star the opportunity to play glittery yet gritty, slightly ditzy yet determined to not let go of dignity. It’s been fashioned as her version of The Wrestler, with rhinestones and feathers subbing in for kneepads and lycra. All the blood, sweat, and tears of someone desperately holding on to their fading glory remains, however. More importantly, the movie is an age-old opportunity for someone who’s been a pinup, and occasionally a punch line, to be seen in a whole new light. This miserablist melodrama wants to reintroduce you to Pamela Anderson, now playing the role of Serious Actor.

Her Shelly Gardner is as much a fixture on the strip as the Sahara, having been part of the ensemble of Le Razzle Dazzle for decades. It’s one of those revues where dozens of dancers parade onstage in lavish and revealing costumes, recalling a vintage Vegas where the va-va-voom crassness was way, way more classy. Shelly started donning the skintight sequined bodysuits back in the late 1980s. Now she plays mother hen to the younger dancers, notably Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song). These surrogate daughters — her relationship with her real daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), falls somewhere between distant and estranged — are part of Shelly’s social circle, along with Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a fellow Razzle Dazzle veteran who’s now a cocktail waitress at a nearby casino. There’s also Eddie (Dave Bautista), the show’s gentle giant of a stage manager known for barking orders, though he has a tendency to get shy whenever Shelly is around.

Eddie’s the one who breaks the news to all of the women during an afternoon get-together: The Dazzle is done; the final performance will be in a few weeks, and the Dirty Circus performers will be taking over their space full-time as of the next day. Eddie felt they deserved to hear it from him first. But the show is the last of its kind, argues Shelly. It’s a classic! The younger dancers recognize that it’s also a dinosaur compared to the flashy magicians and big-name residencies that now dominate the Strip’s Disneyland-for-adults rebranding. They might try out for a Dirty Circus gig, though the glimpse we see of its centerpiece — a topless woman spinning plates — is not exactly promising. Annette offers to get her friend a job slinging cocktails. Shelly just wants to keep dancing. That was the dream she chased and caught, the one for which she gave up everything. And now she has to come to grips with the fact that the dream may very well be over.
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Working from a script by Mozart in the Jungle and The Good Place writer Kate Gersten, Coppola fashions this tale of lives lived in quiet desperation less as a deep dive into what makes Shelly tick and way more as a showcase for her leading lady. The director has mentioned that she caught Anderson’s 2023 Netflix doc Pamela: A Love Story, and felt like this highly misunderstood woman would be perfect portraying someone forced to figure out a late-in-life second act. And knowing what we all know about Anderson, who’s endured her share of setbacks and hard knocks in the public eye, you can see why this particular role might be a good fit. The former Playmate of the Month has a lot of life experiences under her belt — some good, some bad, more than a few that are regrettably ugly. Anderson does indeed throw herself into the part. No one could say she’s not committed.

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It’s Anderson’s personal history, however — all of those IRL falls and rises that she brings into the film simply by virtue of being 1990s pop-culture icon Pamela Anderson — that’s doing most of the heavy lifting here. It’s not a bad performance by any means. Yet the way The Last Showgirl has been embraced by some as a game-changer for Anderson feels like a response to a compelling narrative happening offscreen more than what’s actually onscreen. People so love the idea of Anderson being an extraordinary dramatic actor who’s been shunted to the side that they may be willing to ignore the somewhat shaky star vehicle that’s supposed to be that argument’s Exhibit A. The movie bends over backwards to give this character a sense of dignity, and the sheer amount of labor shows. Nor does Coppola do her lead or the film any favors by continually cutting away to slo-mo scenes of Anderson twirling around outside and staring forlornly at the horizon, which gives off heavy student-film vibes. (As for the inclusion of a sequence in which Curtis dances to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in the middle of a shift: Why?)

If folks are determined to declare a full-blown Anderson-aissance, go for it. Should this exposure lead to future projects that truly do level up Anderson as an actor, then The Last Showgirl‘s mistaking of cut-rate pathos for an actual tragedy-to-triumph arc or working-class heroics will have been worth it. But for a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons.