The Last Showgirl: Pamela Anderson's comeback exposes her limitations

Telegraph

27-02-2025

There can be a connoisseur-ish pleasure in an actor taking a role that feeds on their own public persona: see Michael Keaton in Birdman, or Antonio Banderas in Official Competition, or more recently, Demi Moore in The Substance. But the trouble with all that self-reflexivity is it takes a supple player to pull it off. And, awkward as it might be to admit, Pamela Anderson – whose new film has been touted as something of a comeback – may not be quite on the same level as the talents above.
The former Baywatch star draws on her sex-symbol past for the title role in this elegant but slight piece of serio-whimsy from Gia Coppola, 38-year-old granddaughter of the great Francis Ford. (The script is Kate Gersten's adaptation of her unproduced play, Body of Work.) Anderson's Shelly Gardner is an ageing Las Vegas dancer who has been performing in the same glitzy revue, Le Razzle Dazzle, for decades, even as the costumes grow increasingly tatty and the nightly audience thins. She's an artiste – she sees value in, and draws it from, every performance she gives – but the market for her particular brand of artistry has all but dried up, forcing Shelly to confront the fact that her beloved industry now regards her as fit for the scrap heap.
If the précis above has you picturing Anderson poignantly pirouetting through projected footage of Old Hollywood dancers in the front room of a chintzy bungalow, congratulations: you already have the measure of the film. Though its title suggests a glimpse of the Vegas you never see, the film contains no surprising scenes or moments at all: from the reunion with her estranged and very unglamorous daughter (Billie Lourd) to the faltering date with her long-time lighting director Eddie (a terrific Dave Bautista, whose personal style here is 'what if The Wizard of Oz's Cowardly Lion was a cocaine dealer'), you can see every plot development coming, boinking calmly and predictably away from the underlying premise like a tennis ball bouncing down stairs.
Anderson's performance is certainly decent. But the film keeps butting up against her limits as a performer: the coquettish babydoll voice never cracks; the glossy-mag-enshrined face never quite crumples or fragments. There is no moment to compare with, say, Moore's jaw-dropping mirror scene in The Substance, in which she frantically redoes her makeup to try to look 'young' for a date – for Anderson, at least.
The closest thing to it is given to Jamie Lee Curtis, whose brassy, boozy cocktail waitress Annette is essentially Shelly plus 10 years: our heroine's personal Ghost of Vegas Yet To Come. As Total Eclipse of the Heart strikes up on the casino sound system, Curtis sets down her tray, mounts a podium and begins a trance-like dance – surely a nod towards her iconic striptease sequence in 1994's True Lies. Skin spray-tanned a light shade of creosote, bosoms erupting from her tangerine blazer, face framed by a blonde and chestnut mane, she resembles nothing less than a horny Wookiee, and it's glorious. More of this would have given this showbusiness fable some welcome bite; as it is, it's an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.