Gia Coppola, “The Last Showgirl” (2024)
Running to 90 minutes, this psychological drama about an ageing showgirl packs in much nuance and conflict, more so than most other films that carry on for another 30+ minutes. In a career-defining performance, Pamela Anderson plays Shelli Gardner who is facing an uncertain future after Le Razzle Dazzle, a Las Vegas revue she has starred in for over 30 years, is axed by the new owners of the casino where she works. Shelli reacts to the news of the closure, broken by stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), by loudly criticising the replacement neo-burlesque circus show in which one of her younger co-stars Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) will be performing. Jodie and another young co-star Maryanne (Brenda Song) look up to Shelli as a mother figure; the irony here is that Shelli neglected her own daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) who turns up out of the blue one day to reconnect with her mum and invite her to her high school graduation.
The film has little plot to speak of but basically runs through the two weeks of Shelli’s life before Le Razzle Dazzle’s last performance. Shelli’s reunion with her daughter turns out less than ideal due to Hannah’s emotional distance and Shelli’s own self-absorption. Hannah attends one of LRD’s last shows and is upset that her mother could have devoted her whole life performing in what she (Hannah) considers a trashy and degrading show to women, to the extent that Shelli could neglect her own child and hand Hannah over to relatives in Arizona to care for. Eddie invites Shelli to dinner but the dinner date ends in disaster after Eddie suggests that Shelli could have spent more time with Hannah as a child and Shelli accuses him for not being part of Hannah’s life. (In this way, we learn that Eddie is actually Hannah’s father, and not one of Shelli’s numerous ex-lovers.)
While Shelli’s personal life is filled with such emotional upheavals, the film also runs a small sub-plot around Shelli’s friend and former co-star Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) who works as a cocktail waitress at another casino. Just as Shelli finds her pay packets docked for torn costumes and fabric, so Annette discovers her pay packets are decreasing due to her age. One night while drunk at work, Annette starts dancing and becomes the cynosure of all eyes. The next time we see Annette, she has lost her job and is sleeping in her car, and she begs Shelli to let her stay with her for a short while.
The film’s climactic moment comes when Shelli auditions for a dancing role but is turned down by the casting director (Jason Schwartzman) who tells her she has no talent and was only hired by Le Razzle Dazzle for her looks and youth. Clearly shattered, Shelli berates the director and tells Maryanne (who gave up her own audition slot to comfort her) that she does not love her or Jodie, and the two girls should never have given up their lives and youth for an industry that chews up women and spits them out unmercifully.
The film works due to Anderson’s bravura performance in a role that clearly was written for her, and which shows that behind the superficial blonde-bombshell persona is a woman who sees her own contradictions in Shelli and is brave enough to confront and even laugh at them. The supporting cast members give good, solid performances, in particular Jamie Lee Curtis who excels as a character whose own nonchalant behaviour belies her own financial insecurity (which itself is a warning to Shelli that she too might end up homeless) and Dave Bautista who shows a surprisingly sensitive side to his gruff and stolid personality. Younger actors Shipka, Song and Lourd help round out the cast in playing daughter-type roles that hold a mirror to Shelli’s ambitions as a dancer and what she has done to fulfill those ambitions – and what she has done speaks very much for her narcissism and superficiality, and inability to listen to others like Eddie and Hannah trying to tell her she has been wasting her life and talent in pursuing a worthless dream.
Apart from exploring the mother-daughter relationship and clash-of-generations angle, the film delves into the underside of following one’s dreams and ambitions, exposing them perhaps as unworthy of one’s efforts, in a hermetic desert capitalist society that treats all people, regardless of their character, talent or ability, as factory products to be tossed aside when they are no longer of any use. Talent and ability are valued only as profit-making commodities, not as anything that might be of long-term value in itself. The filters on the filmstock and the use of handheld cameras give “The Last Showgirl” an intimate, documentary-style quality that makes Shelli’s existential pain, the cul-de-sac she finds herself in after over 30 years in pursuit of a dream-turned-nightmare, all the more painful and heart-breaking.
Las Vegas is depicted as a city in decline, cut off from the rest of the world, its inhabitants perhaps as lonely and in pursuit of their own fantasies as Shelli. It tries desperately to stay relevant by keeping with the latest entertainment trends – but the neo-burlesque circus world where Jodie is trying to find her niche looks even trashier than the showbiz revue world Shelli inhabited as its queen for 30+ years.