Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
**½/**** starring Pamela Anderson, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Jamie Lee Curtis written by Kate Gersten directed by Gia Coppola
by Walter Chaw The distaff The Wrestler, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a showcase for Pamela Anderson, reborn in middle age as a serious actor after a career spent being the butt of jokes, the object of desire, and the sufferer of violations to her privacy and dignity. Not to rob her of agency by painting her as strictly a victim–the fact is, Pamela Anderson and the choices she made in how she presented herself in the entertainment industry had everything to do with the dictates of our still-unresolved/perhaps unresolvable systemic, representational biases. Sure, her stolen sex tape was the first of its kind in the early days of so-called celebrity “leaks,” but she made the decision to star in the legendary beefcake-and-jiggle showcase “Baywatch”, didn’t she? To be the PLAYBOY cover girl not once, but 13 times? It’s complicated, and I confess that while I never thought poorly of her, I never thought much about her, period. That’s me, to my shame, being patronizing and lacking empathy and curiosity. Of late, Anderson has stopped wearing makeup in public appearances and redirected the focus to her love of gardening. (She has a show on HGTV.) She’s our Kim Novak: unfairly underestimated, even derided, for her appearance in her prime, finding a measure of redemption by not asking for it, making no apologies, and refusing anymore to fit herself into the molds created for her by the appetites and prejudices of others.
In The Last Showgirl, she’s Shelly, the oldest vet in an antiquated topless show on the Vegas strip Shelly proudly proclaims is the product of a long and hallowed tradition of French burlesque cabarets. The younger dancers in the show, Marianne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, suddenly ubiquitous), regard her as both house mother and maybe an object of pity while seeking other work. Meanwhile, a former dancer, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), occasionally joins them for after-hours bitch sessions. She’s left the showgirl life behind to be a cocktail waitress, but she clearly misses some aspects of a career on the stage. Over-tanned and loud, Annette is the only one of the women who feels like a caricature of a “working girl.” She seems out of place. If she’s meant to be a cautionary tale, she is instead a warning to filmmakers not to create a demeaning stereotype to make an unnecessary point. The lesson of The Last Showgirl, after all, is how these women deserve respect. Even Annette.
Their host/maître d’/bouncer is sad, taciturn Eddie (Dave Bautista), who transparently carries a torch for Shelly, and once in a while, Shelly’s somewhat estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) comes sniffing around for approval. Or is it affection? Whatever it is that grown children with parents who barely know them want. The better, fuller version of this film is Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), which explores the relationships between burlesque dancers in the dehumanizing environment of a 1940s dancehall, culminating in a moment where the “fourth wall” is broken on stage by a fed-up Maureen O’Hara indicting the male spectators for paying a few bucks to look at a girl the way their wives won’t let them look at them. That was 84 years ago.
The trajectory of The Last Showgirl doesn’t contain any surprises. Over its fleet 85 minutes, Shelly goes on a date, her first in a while; learns that her beloved show is closing at last; builds the first tentative bridges back into her daughter’s life; and confronts the idea that what she’s done for her entire life may no longer be a viable career choice. If all the film wants is to give Anderson this moment, to force sonder on the rest of my generation, which has much to answer for when it comes to her, Megan Fox, Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, et al., well, that’s enough. Anderson is magnificent not in spite of her meta-presence but because of it. I said she was our Kim Novak; here, she’s also our Gloria Swanson, or Demi Moore in her proximate reintroduction via The Substance. She is effective as Shelly because she’s Pam Anderson. The movie works because we remember how we thought of her. When Shelly tries to justify showing her breasts to strangers for cash, it should cause introspection for more than just the actor. What did we do to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield? All those PLAYBOYs didn’t buy themselves.
The best scene in the film is a loaded conversation between Shelly and Eddie, who, after some awkwardness, finally comes out of his shell to this woman he’s loved for a long time, only to be critical of her and her choices when he’s the guy working the microphone and managing the payroll. I’m saying that on some level, The Last Showgirl works because it’s an invitation to self-flagellation, penitence, and atonement, however hollow that might be coming from a remove, the isolation of a darkened theatre. When I say, “I’m sorry, truly,” who’s there to hear it but me? I think of Harry Dean Stanton in a peepshow booth in Paris, Texas, because maybe it’s healing the object of our regret and pity now, though I doubt it. In the meantime, we’re congratulating ourselves on being magnanimous enough to let Anderson have a second act. It’s complicated, but she deserves better. I hope she gets everything she wants.
