Pamela Anderson is ‘a revelation’ in poignant Las Vegas-set drama

Gia Coppola’s latest is an atmospheric and sympathetic drama about the showgirls on the Vegas strip, featuring “sharply drawn characters” and outstanding performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson.

Pamela Anderson is a revelation and Jamie Lee Curtis is funny and heart-rending in Gia Coppola’s poignant, Las Vegas-set The Last Showgirl. Anderson plays Shelley, a dancer who has been in the same revue for 30 years, and has just learned the show is closing. She has not just lost a job she adored, at an age when she is unlikely to get another like it; she has lost her very identity.

In a supporting role, Curtis is her friend, Annette, once a showgirl and now hanging on as a cocktail waitress at the same club. That’s not an ideal job for someone like her, with a gambling problem. Although Las Vegas is known for glitz, Anderson and Curtis’s lack of vanity in the roles is among the film’s most powerful features. Coppola depicts their lives with sympathy but also with clear-eyed honesty about the dreams they never achieved and the youth that’s impossible to reclaim.

Shelley is still beautiful, but when we first see her, auditioning for a new job, the camera looks up to capture her slackening jawline. Wearing sequins, feathers and tons of makeup on stage, off-stage Shelley is bare-faced, and looks like anyone else at the grocery store. Throughout, Anderson adopts a baby-doll voice that does wonders to convey the girlish dreams Shelley has never let go of. Annette looks like a caricature of a tough broad, with a shag haircut, a hideous spray tan and frosted lipstick. Curtis plays her as a woman with utter confidence in who she is.

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

A few sharply drawn characters, including two younger showgirls, help reveal how dreamily unrealistic Shelley is. Kiernan Shipka plays Jodie, who is 19 and thinks of her dancing as a lark. Brenda Song is Marianne, already hardened, who says, “It’s a job. And it pays American dollars.” Shelley remains wide-eyed, insisting that their show, called Le Razzle Dazzle, matters, and has a heritage going back to the Lido cabaret in Paris. “No one cares,” Marianne tells her. The Razzle Dazzle is being replaced by a sexy circus, which, as we see in one comic 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 hasn’t seen in a year. She takes Shelley up on her offer to see the revue, then goes backstage and calls it a “stupid nudie show” and “lame trash”. Lourd makes it clear that Hannah is hurt, not malicious.

Hannah isn’t wrong about the show. But that show means everything to Shelley. The film’s delicate balance between those two truths works because Anderson embodies her character with such genuine feeling. She finally gets a big, Oscar-bait scene in which she sobs and tears up her costumes. But the low-key devastation she has captured before that is the real acting triumph. The actors make up for a screenplay that is often too blunt. Shelley loves “feeling seen, feeling beautiful” on stage, she says, explaining too much.

Coppola’s style is atmospheric, as it was in her previous two films. Even more than with most directors, that impressionistic approach may not be to everyone’s taste. Palo Alto (2013) was a sharply observed view of high school students, and Mainstream (2020) was an ambitious mess about internet fame, which became the shallow thing it was supposedly satirising. The Last Showgirl has more of a storyline, but also relies on images and scenes that are unconnected to the plot yet add great depth. Annette dances alone in the club, near the gambling tables, posturing like the showgirl she used to be. But no one pays attention. She looks silly in her cocktail uniform, a red coat and hat that seems like a take on a 1940s bellhop. But Curtis makes it an affecting expression of her character, a sad attempt to recapture – if only for a minute – the youth and attention that used to be hers.

A lot of off-screen information seeps into this film, including Anderson’s newly burnished image. Once she was the Baywatch poster girl. But in the past year she has won praise for the Netflix documentary Pamela: A Love Story, and went viral for attending Paris Fashion Week without makeup, a look that is echoed here.

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