In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a kind of renaissance for 57-year-old Pamela Anderson. After laying her life bare in her 2023 memoir and Netflix documentary, the former Playboy Playmate and Baywatch actress turned her attention to Broadway, where she starred as Roxie Hart in the sassy and seductive musical Chicago.
And now, after years of cameos, bit-parts, and B-movies, Anderson returns to the screen with the atmospheric indie drama The Last Showgirl, directed by Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Godfather maestro Francis Ford Coppola).
The film follows Shelly Gardener (Anderson), a fifty-something dancer on Le Razzle Dazzle. It’s a vintage Vegas revue based on the real-life hit Jubilee!, complete with topless dancers, fabulous feather headdresses, and ritzy rhinestone outfits. Like its non-fictional counterpart, Le Razzle Dazzle abruptly closes after 30 years due to changing tastes and a dwindling audience. This forces Shelly, who’s worked on the extravaganza since the 80s, to work out what’s next.
Despite the veil of glitz and glamour, the world of The Last Showgirl is a bleak one. Coppola’s subjects live in the margins of Sin City, and we rarely get a glimpse into the city’s front-of-house revellers. Instead, the story plays out in run-down dressing rooms, grimy backstage corridors, and Shelly’s shabby, single-story dwelling. Some of the film’s best scenes are set during frantic, well-choreographed costume changes, with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s lens lingering inches from the performers’ faces.

Courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment
Alongside Shelly is Annette, an ageing cocktail waitress and Shelly’s best friend (an unflinching turn from Jamie Lee Curtis). She’s a hustler – long resigned to the groping paws of sleazy gamblers. And Dave Bautista puts in a solid performance as the show’s soft-spoken producer, with the gentle gloominess of a kind soul beaten down by life. Sidenote: if they gave out an Oscar for the best wig, whoever put that fluffy woodland creature on Bautista’s head deserves it.
The show’s cancellation hits Shelly hardest of all. Unlike her peers, who see Vegas for its seedy self, she’s still enraptured by the artificial glory of Le Razzle Dazzle. She spends her time in the dressing room lecturing her young colleagues (deftly portrayed by Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song) on the show’s exotic roots in French lido culture and the glory days, when showgirls were treated like movie stars.
As the film progresses, we realise, heartbreakingly, that Shelly’s outlook isn’t just idealisation, but a coping strategy. Being a showgirl is all she’s ever known. It’s the only thing that’s ever made her feel powerful, and her dedication to the stage has taken a heavy toll. This is most notable in her fractured relationship with her college-age daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who (although it’s strangely unclear) was presumably sent to live with a foster family when she was young. Among other questions of identity, Shelly has to grapple with whether her lifelong commitment to the show has been worth it.

Courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment
As a former sex symbol cast aside by an industry with less than stellar age and beauty standards, Anderson’s casting is suitably meta – but her performance is a complicated one to digest. It’s difficult to judge whether the melodrama with which she delivers her lines is a stylistic choice or a symptom of inexperience. After all, it’s Anderson’s first leading role in years. But, for the most part, her pixie-pitched line readings work well for the role – reflecting Shelly’s perpetually performing persona.
Stylistically, The Last Showgirl engages with its themes wonderfully. Everything is shot close-up and wobbly through a bleary-eyed lens specially developed by Arkapaw. Even the sound design is rough around the edges, giving the impression that the film not only explores showbusiness’ forgotten relics but was made with them, too.
Screenwriter Kate Gersten’s characters are also well-drawn. The inhabitants of The Last Showgirl aren’t overly intellectual, as in too many indie dramas. And amongst the dreariness, there are some genuinely funny moments. Shipka’s performance of an ‘erotic’ dance in a dressing room is particularly amusing – as is a bumbling exchange between Anderson and Bautista in a restaurant.
However, the writing is where many of the film’s problems lie. For starters, there’s no whiff of a plot. While a classic narrative arc isn’t a prerequisite for this sort of film to succeed, there isn’t enough of anything else to justify its absence. The Last Showgirl promises a character study similar to 2008’s The Wrestler but fails to probe its subject with any substantial depth and insight. And while the characters may be vivid, the relationships between them are not. This is particularly true for Shelly and Hannah, whose exchanges feel trite and soulless.

Courtesy of Picturehouse Entertainment
The flick is also littered with a series of music video-esque, dialogue-free scenes – Shelly smoking forlornly beside a chain link fence, Hannah gazing ponderously up into the sweltering Nevada sun. While they are tenderly shot – as is everything in The Last Showgirl – these asides end up proving entirely inconsequential and rather irritating. It felt like the filmmakers stuffed them in to pad out the lacklustre story, rather than to serve any real dramatic purpose.
The film’s investigation into how a patriarchal society exploits and abandons women is a noble and important one. And it’s an interesting, well-researched insight into a slice of Americana many of us – especially in the UK – know very little about. However, like the golden-gilded world it portrays, The Last Showgirl struggles to provide its audience with much more substantial than a flashy facade.
The commendable performances, stunning cinematography, and stirring score don’t make up for the film’s surface-skimming exploration of its themes. Much has been made of the fact that The Last Showgirl was shot in just 18 days – and, from a technical perspective, this is quite a feat. But the narrative problems that plague Gia Coppola’s latest outing could’ve been fixed long before she called action.
The Last Showgirl will have nationwide previews on 10th February, followed by a wide cinema release on 28th February.
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