Pamela Anderson stars in gripping Las Vegas tale, ‘The Last Showgirl’

Oscar nominee Pamela Anderson is probably not a combination of words most people ever thought they would hear. But with her raw and beautiful performance in The last showgirl, it could just happen.

The film, which premiered Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the story of Shelley (Anderson), a showgirl at Vegas’ Le Razzle Dazzle who has devoted the last 30 years of her life to a parade of sequins, rhinestones and feathers. When producers suddenly announce plans to close the show, it leaves Shelley searching for purpose as she struggles to find a new job alongside her showgirls Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song).

Shelley struggles with her strained relationship with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) and tries to sort out her complicated feelings for the show’s stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista), all while trying to figure out what happens when the thing she’s dedicated her life to ends.

The script by Kate Gersten (The Good Place, Schmigadoon!) carries a contemplative tone that allows director Gia Coppola’s camera to linger on its subjects, capturing the layered beauty of these women and the broken sequins of their lives. Gersten spent time with the showgirls of Jubilee, the last show of its kind in Vegas, in the days leading up to its final performance, and the specificity of that experience is clear in the script.

Coppola and Gersten never portray these women (and Eddie) as people to be pitied. There’s plenty of sympathy and empathy for the harsh realities of their lives and the places their dreams have taken them. But we’re not asked to feel sorry for them, only to understand them and the myriad choices that have brought them to this point. As the next generation of the Coppola directorial legacy (she’s Francis’ granddaughter and Sofia’s niece), Gia has a lyrical quality that’s all her own, while still addressing questions about the American dream and womanhood, themes that have haunted her family members.

But with her cheerful camerawork and her use of Las Vegas symbols (a faded statue of Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy is visited several times) she creates an elegy to the Vegas of another era, and to the tarnished reality of once-bright dreams.

Anderson is the perfect choice for Shelley. She herself said that she didn’t believe anyone else could play the role after reading the script — and she’s right. Her own history as a sex symbol gives Shelley a rich, charged context, one that Anderson’s performance, like a shimmering kaleidoscope, allows her to interrogate and twist. With her signature baby-doll voice, Anderson gives Shelley the lost-little-girl quality while also infusing her with something maternal and world-weary. Shelley is the Blanche DuBois of showgirls, a dancer gone to pieces as everything she ever wanted slips through her fingers. But she won’t let the world destroy her in the same way.

Shelley believes that what they do at Le Razzle Dazzle is art, with roots in Parisian berger foils and their ilk. She will not apologize or belittle the show she loves, even if others see it as low-brow and vulgar. Shelley refuses to be objectified, choosing instead to own her sexual glamour. Her dedication to her work and unwavering belief in its worth give her performance dignity, even if the audience—and her fellow dancers—can’t always see it.

Through Shelley, Coppola and Gersten make an argument that seems to bear repeating over and over again: work that focuses on sexuality and women and desire deserves artistic appreciation and recognition as much as anything else, whether it’s dancing in a “tits and feathers” show, making a movie about showgirls, writing a romance novel, or owning your sexuality on television and magazine covers as Anderson once did.

The Last Showgirl explores complex ideas about womanhood and identity, as Shelley rejects a maternal status and invites it into the younger girls she dances with. Her daughter, Hannah, is barely involved in her life, having chosen to remain living with family friends after Shelley refused to give up the show to raise her. Lourd is compelling as a troubled, world-weary girl, clearly yearning for a connection with her mother but searching for something Shelley simply doesn’t have to give. Lourd has spoken about the ways the film echoes the notorious relationship between her mother, Carrie Fisher, and grandmother, Debbie Reynolds, and that history adds a palpable weight to the action.

Being a woman is about sacrifice — whether it’s for your career, your children, your dreams, or a combination of all of them. But The Last Showgirl takes this a step further, forcing us to examine what sacrifices our society deems valid or acceptable, and whether we can ever know whether we have made the right choice when faced with impossible decisions.

There’s not a weak performer in the group, whether it’s Bautista’s wounded Eddie, who’s as hungry for connection as any of the girls he works with, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ Annette, a retired showgirl and cocktail waitress. Lately, Curtis has been wowing audiences with her lack of vanity, most notably in her Oscar-winning performance in Everything everywhere at once, But The Last Showgirl is her most raw and impressive work to date.

Annette is a garish figure, spray-painted to match the Vegas desert sands, squeezing into cocktail uniforms and low-cut tops that signal her futile attempts to cling to her youth and beauty. Curtis makes Annette an immodest figure, always quick to joke and provide comic relief — until she isn’t. In one standout moment, Annette takes to a small stage on the casino floor and dances to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” her desperation and need for admiration oozing from every pore. It’s a wrenching, uncomfortable moment, and Curtis doesn’t blink, leaning into it with vulnerable abandon.

“It’s a hard life, no matter where you go,” Curtis remarked after the premiere, a statement that could be the film’s thesis. Shelley, Annette, Eddie and the rest of this motley crew are just doing their best, trying to get through the harsh realities of their hard lives.

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Toward the film’s climax, Shelley declares, “I am beautiful,” invoking her self-worth and inner light in the face of those who cannot see beyond the most superficial definitions of beauty. Anderson, 57, like Shelley, comes alive in a breathtaking fusion of performance and persona in that moment, thumbing her nose at those who cannot see her skills as an actress or her contributions to entertainment, beyond their potential for objectification and exploitation.

The Last Showgirl is a requiem for every woman who has ever been underestimated for her beauty, her choices, or her art (so basically every woman who has ever existed). But it is also a triumphant proclamation that no matter how faded your sequins or dull rhinestones, no one can take away or diminish a loving heart, especially not when you have the strength to turn it inward. Grade: A