THE LAST SHOWGIRL - Mark Reviews Movies

The Last Showgirl, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 12, 2024

The Las Vegas of today isn't what it was 30 years ago, and 30 years ago, it wasn't the city it was 30 years before that. Shelly (Pamela Anderson), a showgirl in the last of the supposedly tasteful "nudie" shows on the Strip, doesn't seem to realize this or much of anything else about changing culture or the basic, inevitable flow of time. In The Last Showgirl, she's convinced the show will always be the one thing one which she can depend, but pretty quickly into this story, it's canceled.

Where does that leave Shelly? It doesn't leave her with much, because she counts on the regular check to pay the rent and for other necessities, gave up everything else about her life to stay in the show, and has no other talents or skills on which to fall back. Given all of these current and imminent conundrums for the character, director Gia Coppola's movie is surprisingly relaxed and aimless. We watch Shelly try to pick up the pieces of the life she could have had and seemingly just hope for the best when it comes to whatever might happen next for her when the show ends in about a week.

The casting of Anderson, most famous a few decades ago as a model and TV actress, is a potentially clever idea on Coppola's part, and to be sure, Anderson is probably better in this movie than any other acting work she has done in the past. Whether or not that's saying much is almost irrelevant. The point of her casting here is almost more insightful than anything the movie itself has to say. Anderson shows she might have had a career as a legitimate actor, but Hollywood loves typecasting as much as anything else for which the business is known.

Her time for continuing this sort of career path hasn't run out, of course, but there's certainly something to the notion of the woman who became famous as a stereotypical "bombshell" playing a woman who has no clue what to do now that her own, more regionally specific "bombshell" days are finished. Kate Gersten's screenplay doesn't give the star much with which to work, beyond some behind-the-scenes drama and a touch of familial melodrama, but Anderson pulls it off in an admirable way.

With that mostly unexplored angle of the movie out of the way, there's the rest of it, which isn't much better, thoughtful, or specific to this generic character. We get a taste of the continuous chaos backstage of putting on a show at least once a day, although this show's runs have been diminished with a more popular and adult-oriented circus act sharing the stage, and then, long-time stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista) lets the mainstay Shelly know that the theater's owner is ending the show's decades-long run.

In theory, some of the younger performers, including clingy Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and pragmatic Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), will find other gigs in Vegas. We first see Shelly in what turns out to be a brief flash-forward, participating in an audition in which even she seems doubtful that it'll go anywhere. Her fate likely comes down to two choices: to leave the city where she has spent so much of her life, exerted so much effort, and given up on any other possible career path or to end up like Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), who's older than Shelly and still serves cocktails to grabby men in the casino. At one point, Annette show up at Shelly's place and announces she needs a place to stay for a while, so that option doesn't seem too appealing.

The regrets and uncertainty go a bit deeper for Shelly, as well, mainly having to do with her relationship with her estranged adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). Hannah lives with another family, old friends of Shelly's who took the daughter in years ago, in Tucson and is about to graduate from college.

For reasons even the daughter doesn't comprehend (probably because Gersten knows the story needs at least some other source of conflict than the non-existent one with the closing of the show), Hannah returns to Vegas, starts spending a little time with her mother, and gradually realizes the same thing over and over again. Shelly didn't make time for Hannah when she was younger, and now that she has the likelihood of having nothing but time on her hands, Shelly still seems more interested in trying to keep her career going than really connecting with Hannah.

These basics of conflict, revelation, and character development keep repeating themselves throughout the limited story, which is short and to-the-point in length, purpose, and, unfortunately, insight. The performances are fine (Bautista and Lourd stand out among the supporting cast with grounded, low-key performances), although hampered by dialogue that awkwardly highlights how repetitive and on-the-nose the narrative is. The Last Showgirl has a couple things to say about age and the diminishing returns of fame, but that doesn't stop the movie from saying them again and again.

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