Friday, November 29, 2024

Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl with Pamela Anderson and a Down-to-Earth Dave Bautista

THE LAST SHOWGIRL
(Gia Coppola, USA, 2024, 
rated R, 85 minutes)

I had heard, anecdotally, that Pamela Anderson is better than Gia Coppola's film, but I beg to differ (the script was written by Kate Gersten of Mozart in the Jungle and The Good Place). 

That equation oversells Anderson's acting abilities, which are just fine, and undersells Coppola's directing abilities, which don't exactly fall short.

At its worst, Coppola's third feature film, after 2013's Palo Alto and 2020's Mainstream, feels a little unfinished, and Anderson's serially self-sabotaging showgirl character, Shelly--and not her performance--is frustrating and occasionally downright off-putting.

Blade Runner 2049's Dave Bautista, who plays the producer of the Razzle Dazzle revue in which Shelly has plied her trade since the mid-1980s, is particularly strong in a restrained performance. The former wrestler could have been just another muscleman actor/comedian, but Bautista shows up in roles, like Eddie, where musculature doesn't matter. Love that about him. 

Anderson, quite good in a role tailor-made for her talents, receives backing from a solid supporting cast, especially Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, and Billie Lourd--Lourd and Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a former showgirl with frosted tips, previously worked together in Ryan Murphy's horror comedy Scream Queens--though the writing around Lourd's bitter college student, Shelly's estranged daughter Hannah, seems a little unfocused at times. 

It may seem impolitic to say about a venture both female-made and female-centered, but I felt that Bautista, virtually unrecognizable in Kurt Russell hair and salt-and-pepper beard, was the MVP.

In a different film that could've proven destabilizing, but not this one. He gives Coppola's heightened scenario the down-to-earth ballast it needs; if only Shelly appreciated this decent man more, but then she has a shallow view of men, possibly because they've often had a shallow view of her. 

There's no body horror, but still...I wasn't expecting the parallels with Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan and, especially, Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. At times, Shelly makes Demi Moore's fading TV star Elisabeth Sparkle seem downright stable, not least since Elisabeth is a more isolated character. 

Shelly, by contrast, has people in her life who try to help, but she's convinced her beauty and--very modest--talent will see her through, except she's in her late-50s competing against women in their teens, like Shipka's 19-year-old Jodie, or in their 20s, like most of the other performers (Curtis's Annette works as a cocktail waitress).

It's a minor matter and doesn't harm the film, but I was amused by Coppola's inclusion of not one, but two Rooney songs. Then again, Rooney member Robert Schwartzman, Gia's cousin, produced the film, and his brother and bandmate, Jason Schwartzman, has a small role as a director.

It's the power ballads, though, like Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," that truly define the film--and Anderson's Shelly, who isn't exactly living in the present. She's an '80s lady living in a postmillennial world.  

I always suspected that Pamela Anderson was capable of more than the one-dimensional roles she's played to date, both on and off the screen, and she proves it in The Last Showgirl. I wouldn't say she surprised me or surpassed my expectations, but then: I expected her to be good, and she is.


The Last Showgirl opens at Los Angeles's AMC Century City on Fri, Dec 13, for one (Oscar-qualifying) week only; nationwide on Fri, Jan 10, 2025.

Images: the IMDb (Pamela Anderson by Zooey Grossman and cast photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb - © 2024 Getty Images - Image courtesy gettyimages.com), and Roadside Attractions (Dave Bautista).

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