Pamela Anderson is a ‘revelation’ in this moving drama set in Las Vegas

Gia Coppola’s latest is a moody, heartwarming drama about Las Vegas Strip showgirls, featuring “clearly defined characters” and standout performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson.

Pamela Anderson is a revelation, and Jamie Lee Curtis is hilarious and heartbreaking in Gia Coppola’s moving Las Vegas-set The Last Showgirl. Anderson plays Shelley, a dancer who has been doing the same show for 30 years and has just learned it’s closing. She’s not only lost the job she loved, at an age when it’s unlikely she’ll get another one like it; she’s lost her very identity.

In a supporting role, Curtis plays her friend Annette, a former dancer who now waitresses at the same club. It’s not an ideal job for someone like her, with a gambling problem. Although Las Vegas is known for its glitz, the lack of vanity of Anderson and Curtis in the roles is one of the film’s strongest features. Coppola portrays their lives with compassion but also with a sobering honesty about dreams they never realized and a youth that can never be regained.

Shelley is still beautiful, but when we first see her, auditioning for a new job, the camera pans up to capture her sagging jawline. Wearing sequins, feathers and a lot of makeup on stage, Shelley is naked offstage and looks like anyone else in the grocery store. Throughout, Anderson adopts a doll voice that works wonders in conveying the girlish dreams that Shelley never gave up. Annette looks like a tough chick caricature, with a shag haircut, a terrible spray tan and matte lipstick. Curtis plays her as a woman with total confidence.

With its sophisticated use of point of view, the film allows us to see Las Vegas in the romantic way Shelley does, still sparkling. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography is soft and beautiful. There are no garish views of the neon Vegas strip. We see Shelley in a brightly lit dressing room or rushing onstage with other dancers in their elaborate costumes. But we also see, more clearly than Shelley, that their rhinestone headpieces and feathers belong to a show that has become, as a younger dancer says, “a dinosaur.”

Several sharply drawn characters, including two younger dancers, help reveal how dreamily unrealistic Shelley is. Kiernan Shipka plays Jodie, who is 19 and thinks her dancing is a lark. Brenda Song plays Marianne, already hardened, who says, “It’s a job. And it pays in American dollars.” Shelley remains wide-eyed, insisting that their show, called Le Razzle Dazzle, has meaning and a tradition dating back to the Lido cabaret in Paris. “Nobody cares,” Marianne tells her. Razzle Dazzle is replaced by a sexy circus that, as we see in one hilarious scene, includes a stripper who also spins plates.

Billie Lourd is tough and moving as Hannah, Shelley’s hostile college-age daughter, whom she often neglected as a child and whom she hasn’t seen in a year. She accepts Shelley’s offer to see the revue, then goes backstage and calls it a “stupid nude show” and “pathetic trash.” Lourd makes it clear that Hannah is hurt, not spiteful.

Hannah isn’t wrong about the show. But the show means everything to Shelley. The film’s delicate balance between these two truths works because Anderson embodies her character with such genuine emotion. She eventually gets a big, Oscar-worthy scene where she sobs and rips her costumes apart. But the understated devastation she captures earlier is the real acting triumph. The actors compensate for a script that’s often too direct. Shelley loves “feeling seen, feeling beautiful” on stage, she says, over-explaining too much.

Coppola’s style is moody, as in her two previous films. Even more so than most directors, this impressionistic approach may not be to everyone’s taste. Palo Alto (2013) was a sharply observed look at high school students, and Mainstream (2020) was an ambitious mess about internet fame becoming the shallow thing it supposedly satirized. The Last Showgirl has more of a plot, but it also relies on images and scenes that are unrelated to the plot but add a lot of depth. Annette dances alone in a club, at the card tables, posing like the showgirl she once was. But no one notices. She looks silly in her cocktail uniform, red coat, and hat that seems like a 1940s version of a bellboy. But Curtis makes it a touching expression of her character, a sad attempt to reclaim — if only for a moment — the youth and attention that once belonged to her.

There’s a lot of off-screen information that seeps into this film, including Anderson’s newly polished image. She used to be the poster girl for Baywatch. But last year, she won praise for the Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story and went viral for attending Paris Fashion Week without make-up, which is a repeat here.

And Coppola—Francis’ granddaughter and Sofia’s niece—made the film with a whole bunch of other family members. Jason Schwartzman, her cousin, has a small but important role as the director, for whom Shelley auditioned. His brother, Robert Schwartzman, is one of the producers. The screenwriter, Kate Gersten (a successful TV writer and playwright herself), is married to another cousin. Coppola’s mother, Jacqui Getty, designed the costumes. She has all the makings of a nepo-baby, but The Last Showgirl proves that Gia Coppola has a real artist’s eye and a rich, distinctive style of her own.