Score: 4 / 5
With a flair for the melancholy of yesteryear, Gia Coppola returns to the director's chair (after Palo Alto and Mainstream) in her best feature yet. I admit disliking her previous films, and feeling nervous heading into this one, not least because of the overblown and largely misunderstood nature of "showgirl" life in this year of Taylor Swift's shallow appropriation of the culture. Coppola hasn't yet handled much plot-driven storytelling, and that remains true here, as the film is more a character study than a narrative. So if you're looking for a dynamic story, glamorous energy, or the fantasy of theatrical burlesque, you might want to look elsewhere. But if you're used to Mrs Henderson Presents and Moulin Rouge and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Burlesque and want something with a bit more teeth, look no further than The Last Showgirl.
Le Razzle Dazzle is a long-running French-style revue on the Vegas Strip, and Shelly has performed there for three decades. Now 57, she's blissfully (perhaps willfully) resilient and persistent, sure that she'll continue working as a showgirl until she dies. Shelly comes from a time when showgirls, to be employed and successful, worked tirelessly for their craft. Of course, the dancing is a major part, and keeping up one's health to maintain a certain body image that will garner tips, but she's also a seamstress, choreographer, props master, and even a sort of de facto manager of her costars, the significantly younger women who dance in her show. She's a motherly figure to the young women, counseling them through professional turmoil and family abandonment and bad relationships and unwanted pregnancies, all while maintaining a caring and gentle demeanor in an old-school professional sense. When a doorknob has been changed backstage and it rips a gown, Shelly is the kind of busybody mother hen who will repeat her disdain about it until she finds who's responsible and berate them for the inconvenient oversight. She can't wrap her mind around the fact that things can and do change.
She's told, quite suddenly, by her old friend/former lover/stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista in a subtle and brave featured performance), that the show is finally closing in two weeks, due to poor ticket sales. Shelly's reaction to this crisis fuels what little story is left, which is basically Shelly auditioning for another show, being confronted with prejudice about her age, and dealing with a lack of legacy, a lack of retirement savings, and a lack of family. It's a bleak and depressing story to tell, yet Coppola, writer Kate Gersten, and star Pamela Anderson work in graceful tandem to make what could be a tragedy something approaching life-affirming sublimity.
Anderson imbues Shelly with more than we might expect from the real-life Playboy Playmate who became an internationally regarded actress from Baywatch on television to Chicago on Broadway. The brilliance of her casting only establishes a foundation for her mystique here, as she presents a fully-realized and deeply flawed woman in the prime of her life who nobody believes is in the prime of her life. She knows the history of her craft and tries to impart it to her younger comrades in their cramped dressing room: their show honors "Parisian Lido culture," she preaches to the girls rolling their eyes and wishing she'd shut up so they can get onstage. Yet Shelly is also effete to a fault, a fey sort of person, delicate and immature-sounding, almost babyish in her sickly sweet affectation. She's also stubborn and weirdly attached to life as she imagines it, living life through distinctly rosy glasses as she chooses glitz and glamor over things that are messy and tarnished.
To that end, Shelly is estranged from her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd, another inspired casting choice), who comes visiting. During their talks, we quickly gather that their relationship is strained to a breaking point. Shelly wants to have a relationship with her adult daughter, but Hannah won't have it. Furious that Shelly would give up her baby to a foster family -- details are vague on this arrangement -- to pursue her dreams of dancing in feather boas and rhinestone-bedazzled bikinis, Hannah is about to graduate college and seems to want some kind of closure with her mother. Or at least to give her one last chance to be the mother Hannah always wanted.
Spoiler alert: things don't go well. While we might easily blame Shelly for her ignorance about Hannah's life -- she forgets Hannah's age and major, right off the bat -- Hannah seems determined to make her mother miserable for effectively abandoning her. Hannah even attends Shelly's show for the first time, curious about what her mother gave her up to do instead; her excoriating review of the show is a highlight in this film, shattering Shelly's lifelong esteem and purpose while provoking real territoriality and anger from the woman who so clearly needs to express real, raw emotions. Life on the stage can so easily make someone disingenuous or even unemotional in real life, and Shelly has built her mask to last.
Shelly's life seems to be that of a hermit. Without much money and without any family, she hides away in her dark little home to watch Hollywood golden-age dancing videos with the likes of Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, losing touch with reality and with her own future prospects. She has no concerns that her own show could close -- and indeed is closing -- and no real plans for what comes next; her nostalgia is a prison through which she is forced to reconsider her own legacy, purpose, capabilities, and of course the cost of having chased her dreams. Thankfully, we're not simply adrift in her fracturing sense of self; this isn't Black Swan, though it does share some connective tissue. Not least of note is that Shelly is also kind of nasty when things don't go her way, or when she feels slighted; she's more a petulant child than a professional showgirl, and most people tolerate or ignore her eccentricities. But she has a special friend who provides the film's best scenes of context and contrast.
Jamie Lee Curtis steals the whole movie as Annette, Shelly's longest friend who used to dance in the same show. Now a cocktail waitress in a casino, and gambling perhaps more than she should, Annette is a grotesque figure with a gorgeous personality. Chain-smoking and an alcoholic, she even loses her home in this brief story, and frankly I wanted to know a hell of a lot more about her character. When she, too, faces being laid off in favor of younger servers, she wades into the deep end, arriving at work anyway and dancing on a table (to "Total Eclipse of the Heart," and this is the single best use of that song I've ever witnessed) in a total haze. It wasn't until certain scenes with Curtis that I became aware that the grainy, oddly focused with a blurry periphery, dreamlike cinematography wasn't intended to put us into Shelly's headspace. Rather, it's simply the visual approach to people in this world. They're all the center of their own shows, and the camera frames them as if it were an unfocused spotlight practicing its movements.
I loved the simplicity of this film. Actually, it feels like Coppola is filming in a style similar to Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Anora) in its arthouse approach to a quiet character drama couched in a larger, stylized world slowly decaying. This approach has the effect of putting us at ease in the viewing experience, and it seems to put the performances at ease as well; this is some of the most naturalistic acting I've seen on screen all year, and that's saying a lot when these women are strutting around in their getups. We're given almost no direct (or reliable) information regarding the actual content of her show; the closest we get to her reality is her audition for another show, which is awkward and painful to watch, particularly due to Anderson's palpable joy and star-struck eyes. Around her, these realistic and grounded characters bounce off each other in naturalistic and believable ways. But make no mistake: Anderson and Curtis are alchemical in this tightly framed little window into the souls of struggling, aging women who bought into the American dream and now must face the cost.
