The Last Showgirl
Gia Coppola (2024)
Kate Gersten’s screenplay is adapted from her own stage play. Although that play is (so far) unproduced, Gia Coppola seems at pains literally to obscure her film’s origins as a theatre piece. At least, you hope that’s the case – that The Last Showgirl‘s muddy lighting and sometimes blurry images aren’t an accident. The handheld camerawork makes sense when the performers in the long-running, soon-to-close Las Vegas revue at the heart of the story hurry downstairs from dressing rooms to the stage; during passages of dialogue between two characters just sitting or standing, the restless camera is a desperate (and futile) assertion that the situation isn’t static. Perhaps Coppola (who is Francis Ford’s granddaughter), in designing the murky visuals with DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw, had the same idea that Edward Berger had in Conclave: the days of traditional Vegas entertainment, like those of the Catholic Church, are numbered – let’s make it look as if night is falling on the institution. Whatever her intentions, Coppola’s technique merely draws attention to Kate Gersten’s script – because you can hear better than you can see what’s going on.
Gersten wrote the source material quite recently – ‘inspired … [by] her visits to the Jubilee! show before it closed in 2016’ (Wikipedia) – but the piece itself has an antique feel, in terms of how the dramatis personae are written and interact. The title character is Shelly Gardner, now fifty-seven years old. Shelly has been in the line-up of showgirls in ‘Le Razzle Dazzle’ revue, at a casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip, since the 1980s; as the years have passed her place in the stage line-up has shifted backwards. Her pal Annette, probably a decade older, got the push from Le Razzle Dazzle and now works locally as a cocktail waitress. Hard-bitten, wisecracking Annette’s purpose is to complement emotionally vulnerable Shelly – who still insists, against all the evidence, on the enduring beauty and artistry of showgirl work (and deplores as ‘obscene’ the neo-burlesque show with which the casino owners are replacing Le Razzle Dazzle). Shelly has a twenty-something daughter, Hannah, from whom she’s estranged but who now (for no good reason other than to compound her mother’s sadness) reappears in Shelly’s life and even comes to watch her perform: dismissing what she sees as a ‘stupid nudie show’, Hannah returns to Arizona, where she’s soon to graduate from college. Eddie, the revue’s soft-spoken, diffident producer, seems to carry a torch for Shelly and they eventually go out for dinner together. The evening ends badly but not before it’s revealed that Eddie is Hannah’s father, which his daughter doesn’t know. Shelly shares a cramped dressing room with two much younger showgirls, Jodie and Mary-Anne, both with problems of their own, both inclined to treat Shelly as the mother figure they can tell those problems to …
The Last Showgirl has attracted attention chiefly because Shelly is played by Pamela Anderson. It arrives in cinemas hot on the heels of two other movies, Emilia Pérez and The Substance, whose impact was inextricably linked to the identity of their lead actress. For her work in Gia Coppola’s film, Anderson, herself fifty-seven, didn’t, unlike Karla Sofia Gascón and Demi Moore, get an Oscar nomination but she did, along with those two, receive Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild recognition – not bad going for someone whose time in the big time was assumed to have ended along with Baywatch (and its movie spin-offs). While she hasn’t been unanimously praised, Anderson has had plenty of enthusiastic reviews for The Last Showgirl. A good few, of course, have described her as a ‘revelation’ in the film – which is bound to be the case for viewers like me who’ve never seen an episode of Baywatch or anything else Anderson has done. She does give an appealing performance, though. Pamela Anderson looks (and, especially, sounds) to be a limited actress but that’s probably part of what’s appealing; it certainly contributes to the fragility she gives Shelly. Jamie Lee Curtis’s greater histrionic flair and confidence as Annette has the effect of making Curtis too powerful for her cliched support role; Dave Bautista (Eddie), Billie Lourd (Hannah) and Brenda Song (Mary-Anne) seem a better fit for their parts. Kiernan Shipka (Jodie) stood out as an exceptionally thoughtful child performer when she played Don Draper’s daughter in Mad Men. I’d not seen Shipka again until now; at twenty-five, she still emits a vibrant intelligence. It’s an unusual quality but not right in The Last Showgirl.
Some films with ‘last’ in their title often don’t do much more than confirm what it says on the can and The Last Showgirl is one of them. Kate Gersten’s unperformed play in fact had a more interesting and allusive title – Body Work – but you can see why the people behind Coppola’s film might have thought that insufficiently commercial. What’s disappointing about The Last Showgirl, even allowing for its modest production budget (<$2m), is how little ‘show’ is shown. There are solo numbers of sorts: Annette drunkenly moves around on the stage of the cocktail bar (to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’); in the dressing room, Jodie shows off to Shelly and Mary-Anne a new bump-and-grind routine that she’s developed; Shelly, with unemployment staring her in the face, auditions for a new show with what she considers to be artistic dance: the casting director (a cameo from Jason Schwartzman – Gia Coppola’s cousin, once removed!) tells her that since it’s neither gymnastic nor sexy, it’s not what he’s looking for. But only in the film’s last sequence does Coppola gives Le Razzle Dazzle show – the final show – any real screen time. I think I liked this sequence better than any other in The Last Showgirl, though it’s also in one respect among the worst: Shelly sees Hannah backstage, then Hannah and Eddie together in the audience, but-it’s-only-a-fantasy. What’s good about the finale is that, when Shelly puts on her broadest showgirl grin, it’s not only masking her heartbreak but seems also to express her naïve, unshakeable belief in the value of what she’s doing – has loved doing – on stage.
6 March 2025