The Last Showgirl

2024

It’s an upside-down year for movies. First, Ralph Fiennes as the Cardinal leading a conclave fails to impress despite having all the right buzzwords. Now, Pamela Anderson playing an aging Vegas showgirl has proven to be one of the most beautiful films of the year!

The Last Showgirl, directed by a minor Coppola (Gia), looks awful for me on paper. I don’t often like character studies. I am suspicious when dismissed stars make a “serious awards movie” in their maturity. And—let’s face it—it’s Pamela Anderson! Well, don’t count those chickens, judge that cover, or knock this movie before you try it.

Anderson shows up. Pam does not. And she brings Keirnan Shipka, Dave Bautista, Billie Lourd, Jaime Lee Curtis and, in traditional Coppola cousin casting, Jason Schwartzmann with her. And none of them show me what I expect from them. They are all, in a word, glorious.

Anderson’s 56-year-old showgirl lead believes in the Paris Lido, the Zegfeild Girls, the Follies Bergeres, and their last living descendant, the Las Vegas showgirl. She loves her job. It brings her joy and identity and purpose. She thinks it brings these to the audience as well. And she hates that after her revue closes the only shows in town are raunchy, silly, and gaudy. In her mind, the showgirl exemplifies glamor and beauty and class. Because she remembers a time when it did. Lost in dreams of her art and the glorifcation of the American girl, she has defiantly ignored the way her job has become something like a Muzak stripper for drunk gamblers. The closing of her show is shattering.

And, indeed, what happens when you spend your life altering your body and soul to fit into an ideal of beauty from which the world has moved on? She doesn’t have the elite skills or the low standards required to get work in today’s Vegas. As her cocktail waitress BFF, Jamie Lee Curtis earns the Oscar you may not feel she deserved a couple years ago. And Dave Bautista is the shy stage manager that would probably turn out to be her soulmate if she were looking for one. They all vanish into the glitter and kitsch that they lovingly call home.

I had the lowest of expectations for this movie, but it’s not just a vehicle for a Pamela Anderson comeback push. It’s a touchingly made American elegy that leaves no easy answers among the sequins on the floor.