THE LAST SHOWGIRL
TWO STARS Time has been called on the last, big glamour show in Vegas and with it, the career of its oldest showgirl.
DRAMA US English #THELASTSHOWGIRL Starring Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis
Lurking deep inside THE LAST SHOWGIRL is a great film. Like Gia Coppola’s (grand-daughter of Francis, niece to Sofia) provocative PALO ALTO, this is stuffed with possibility from concept to casting, but unlike her debut, it suffers from such uncertainty as to neutralise any glimmer of hope.
Out in Vegas, the curtain has been called on the last of the big, glitzy, all-singing, all-dancing showgirl extravaganzas. It’s yesterday’s show. Along with it, the career of 50-something Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is over which, naturally enough, triggers an existential crisis. After all, it’s all she’s known and if Shelly is no longer a showgirl, what is she? More than that, her whole life is under threat; her identity, her home, her family, security, health-care and what’s left of her future.
Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a portent of what’s to come. Shelly’s best friend works the tables as a cocktail waitress, several sizes and many generations too old for her tacky uniform. She survives on tips to pay for a drink-and-gambling problem with a pension-plan that amounts to dying on the job. It’s a fate Shelly has worked hard to avoid. But now?
THE LAST SHOWGIRL aims to be a mirror to the lie of the American dream, the deception of youth and beauty, to the misery of unchecked capitalism and an uncaring society. And what better crucible in which to tell the story than the freewheeling, winner-takes-all reality of Las Vegas; amazing when the lights are on, terrifying when they’re turned off. So yeah, it’s a story stuffed with possibility.
Yet Coppola seems utterly uncertain how to bring any of this home. The script is discordant, the performances uneven, the through-lines illogical. Montages feel like the props they are - Shelly wandering around an empty carpark to emphasise dislocation, a vacant lot to underscore decay, gazing into the sunrise of a failed future. The story may be set in Vegas but the lack of subtly is astounding.
Casting Anderson and Curtis - both women who know first hand what it’s like to be at the unfashionable end of fashion - lends instant appeal and gravitas but neither can escape Coppola’s ‘see-what-sticks’ approach to story-telling. There are a couple of stand out scenes that reveal what could have been, Shelly’s first audition in decades is one, but they’re too few and too far between. Even a slender runtime can’t paper the cracks on the face of THE LAST SHOWGIRL, a show that becomes an ordeal for those living it, and those watching it.
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