Jack Simon/Courtesy photo
I believe wholeheartedly that every person has at least one great piece of art inside them. Pamela Anderson, starring as aging Las Vegas performer Shelly in “The Last Showgirl,” just showed us hers.
Yes, you can reason that she was lucky to be teamed up with a very game Jaimie Lee Curtis; yes, the role was lobbed up for her as an alley-oop off the backboard; and yes, maybe she could never duplicate the skill displayed this time, but maybe it doesn’t matter.
Maybe if you’re making these pitiful excuses, you are a tarpit of a human who should trip headfirst into one. Anderson accesses and exercises that yearning piece inside us all that hopes for the immortality that great art provides. You only need one. Granted, 98% of people don’t get that, even if it’s inside 100% of us. “The Last Showgirl” gifts Anderson that, and it is a gift to us all.
Director Gia Coppola — yes, a relation to Francis Ford Coppola — knows what she had with Anderson and trains the camera on her with constant medium-close shots for her speaking moments. Last week, I talked about how poor casting can sink a potentially great film; here, it elevates what could have been a mediocre one. The principal stars a trio: Anderson as Shelly, Curtis as casino cocktail waitress, and Dave Bautista as the director of the fictional Las Vegas show Le Razzle Dazzle that Shelly stars in. It redeems any faults “The Last Showgirl” has.
The big fault here is the story’s structure, which is an absolute catastrophe. While the script does not have any ugly lines, its assembly resembles an ADHD kid with a jumbled Lego box. Not much sense is put into how one scene leads into another, leaving the narrative arc depressingly flat.
When Shelly reconciles with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), it is quickly followed by a fallout backstage at Shelly’s show that has Hannah demeaning Shelly’s livelihood and lifeblood. It’s a plotline that should have been the film’s heartbeat, one that is set up in the first act and then followed up with a powerful knockout punch in the third act. But instead, the emotion put in lands with an awkward thud.
Coppola could use a lesson in pacing. In addition to not adjusting the script in a director’s pass, she insists on shoehorning in these awful city landscape transition montages. They are not only redundant, but they are also poorly done. These shots are done devoid of love, which is upsetting for me, who considers Vegas one of the great places on Earth. I’ll watch any flick set in New Orleans or Las Vegas. But here, the shots mean nothing, they add nothing, and they remove any immersion an audience member could manage to have.
All the behind-the-scenes work has seemingly been put into the cinematography. Coppola and Director of Photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw put together a gorgeous-looking film. Dripping in texture and grain, every shot is a colourful hodgepodge, whose lighting is never dull and always alluring. I suspect, although I have been wrong before and I will be wrong again, Coppola and Arkapaw used a classic filming trick where a Vasoline-like substance is smeared onto the lens to give the diegetic lights a bleary effect.
This blurriness in the mise-en-scene communicates a dreaminess perfect for the old-school Las Vegas that Shelly still lusts for. It is the Vegas that she still sees, even if it is long gone. This pseudo-reality then pays off at the end when Shelly imagines the world she wishes to live in, where she can have it all: Where she can dance and feel like a superstar, have her daughter adore her, and have her true love cheering her on. But by design, Las Vegas is there to fool you.
Let’s loop around to discuss the performances I opened this review raving over. I wanted to save this part for last, as it is by far the film’s paramount feature. The Anderson-Curtis-Bautista trio all deserve recognition. They support one another with perfect chemistry while still being independently sublime. In particular, I am struck by Bautista’s deep bass voice being so revealing in its richness. It carries his character’s lifetime baking in the desert sun and surviving the city where people go to indulge their traits.
Now we’re back to Anderson, a woman who before this never got the chance to be anything besides a prop. Now, her face rises and falls, her voice contorts with a special briskness to match her rambling dialogues, and she has an innate ability to garner heart-wrenching sympathy. While certainly not perfect, “The Last Showgirl” will be remembered vividly for decades to come off of Anderson’s work.
Critic Score: 8 out of 10
Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at [email protected] for inquiries of any type.