Thoughts on The Last Showgirl

    I went to the Angelika Film Center in NYC and saw The Last Showgirl, a 2024 film directed by Gia Coppola and written by Kate Gersten. The film stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a Las Vegas showgirl in her fifties who has performed in a revue for thirty years, then faces uncertainty when she finds out it's closing due to low ticket sales and being outdated and passe.

    As the oldest performer with the most seniority in the show, Shelly values the old-fashioned style of the show, seeing it as classier than other Vegas shows (to her own detriment, as she often slut-shames other shows while defending the topless revue as artistic and "French"), she denigrates the burlesque-style circus show that is replacing them as the "dirty" circus show, and is a mother figure to the other dancers, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka). She is also close with Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cocktail waitress at the casino who was ousted from the show six years prior.

    Eddie (Dave Bautista), the show's producer, breaks the news to Shelly and her friends that the show is closing in two weeks, and it sends Shelly into a spiral, as she barely has a pension or any retirement plan, had always lived for the show and the glamour, and doesn't have any backup plans for other survival day jobs.

    Shelly reaches out to her semi-estranged daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), who has largely grown up with family friends and her surrogate mom, and is graduating from an Arizona college with a degree in photography. She is emotionally distant from her mother, who wasn't there for her during her childhood, valuing the glory of being beautiful and feeling alive in the stage show over being a reliable parent, and Hannah is more realistic and blunt while Shelly, in Pamela Anderson's trademark soft breathy voice, had her head more in the clouds.

    It had some good needle drop moments, like Annette doing an impromptu dance in the casino floor area to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," or Shelly cueing Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night" for an audition for another show. And I kept picturing Jamie Lee Curtis as having worked on this film in between her appearances on The Bear, especially when her character is in the kitchen and getting flustered, making me think of Carmy's mom and her unchecked mental health issues.

    I thought the movie had a good lead performance with Anderson, who is given the chance to shine in an artsy indie drama, but the rest of the film felt lacking. It kept following similar beats to Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008), with the aging performer refusing to accept that their time in the spotlight was over, being overly romantic about their glory days. and both having an estranged relationship with their daughter. It made it hard to see the movie as its own story, and Shelly often came off as unrealistic and self-centered, beyond her sweet-natured demeanor. The movie feels like it just abruptly ends, when it didn't really feel complete, and I wanted the story to feel more fleshed out. So I liked it OK, but felt it could have been stronger and less of hitting predictable emotional beats in a drama.