One of the more gratifying subplots of the current awards season sees Pamela Anderson, much patronised and misused premillennial legend, gaining earned respect for a role that asks more than mere inhabitation.
It is hard not to think that, without the right break, Anderson might have ended up like poor Shelly in Gia Coppola’s slight but memorable third feature. With cracked voice and increasingly desperate aspect, she is, as Coppola’s title implies, a Las Vegas performer of the old school: on stage, all tights and feathers and costume jewellery; offstage, a kindly sort doing her best for ageing chums.
Neither the director nor the star would, one suspects, regard the suggestion of such an alternative path for Anderson as any sort of insult. The Last Showgirl presents Shelly as a heroic survivor – for now, anyway – of a great tradition. (In this city, anything that has lasted longer than a decade counts as historical artefact.) In the opening sections we learn that Le Razzle Dazzle, the French-themed revue in which she has performed for 30 years, is about to be swept away in the never-ending cultural churn. It is old Vegas.
We have heard this before. At the end of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, released about the time Shelly started in Le Razzle Dazzle but set a whole decade earlier, Robert De Niro’s character bemoans the fake pirate ships clogging up venues once meant for adults. In truth, the heyday of showgirl Vegas was back in the 1950s. Coppola’s film, lament for an era as lost as the old west, knows it is in grand elegiac mode and works that tone to ruthless death.
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The cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who got her break on Coppola’s Palo Alto in 2013, finds endless variation on the city at magic hour – the gigawatts of neon just becoming visible as the horizon reddens. The characters sad in mufti. The nothingness of desert just visible through the haze.
Suggestions of Sofia Coppola, Gia’s aunt, inveigle themselves at such points but the younger director doesn’t yet have the same control once indoors with her characters. Kate Gersten’s script works in broadish types. As the show’s stage manager, Eddie, Dave Bautista gets, not for the first time, to portray the lovable “bear of a man” – not nearly so mean as he looks.
Jamie Lee Curtis, who, like Anderson, secured a Screen Actors Guild nomination for her work, has enormous fun – maybe too much fun – as Annette, the brassy cocktail waitress who takes no nonsense from anyone: skin the colour of weathered bark, wigs from here to Flagstaff.
Critics have been divided on the sequence that has Annette, increasingly edged out by younger staff, dance solo and ignored to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart on a podium in a public space. Too mawkish? Too on the nose? Maybe, but it certainly gives The Last Showgirl the late set piece it needs.
[ Pamela Anderson: ‘I felt like life was really like death for me’Opens in new window ]
In truth, Shelly, as written, is not a masterpiece of nuance either. There are good scenes here. A rarely visited daughter pops up to look down her nose at the half-baked variation on Folies Bergère. The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity.
But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being. There is certainly a sense of the right actor finding the right role at the right time.
One cannot accuse Anderson of playing herself, however. She quietly and politely stands up for a swathe of middle-aged women, few even this glamorous, who get by pretending an inevitable end is never going to arrive. Come to think of it, we all do that. We’d go mad otherwise.
In cinemas from Friday, February 28th
