In the tradition of THE LAST STARFIGHTER, THE LAST WITCH HUNTER and THE LAST SAMURAI comes THE LAST SHOWGIRL (2024). This is a simple movie, and the kind of thing I probly wouldn’t have heard of if there hadn’t been talk about it being an awards contender and surprise comeback for a once hugely famous actress who pretty much never got any critical respect in her heyday. Pamela Anderson (BARB WIRE) is outstanding in the title role, and it has a meta quality to it since it’s about coming to terms with aging in an industry that mostly appreciated her as a sex object.

She plays Shelly, 57-year-old cast member of a long-running show on the Vegas Strip called Le Razzle Dazzle. She’s been in the show since the ‘80s and is kind of a friend/mother figure to some of her younger co-stars, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, LONGLEGS, RED ONE) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, “Hostage Child,” BLADE). They also hang out with a grizzled former showgirl now working as a cocktail waitress at one of the casinos, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, BLUE STEEL). Both Shelly and Annette seem to be sort of delusionally hanging onto jobs they’ve aged out of, but they’re proud to be able to be the o.g.s offering advice to the new generation.

One night the friends are having a dinner party when they find out Jodie invited the producer of the show, Eddie (Dave Bautista, WRONG SIDE OF TOWN). The others are mortified at the guaranteed social awkwardness, and Jodie is confused. She can’t discern between someone they’d be nice to at work and someone they’d want to hang out with at home.

You know I’m a Bautista fan, and this is another feather in his intercontinental championship cap, a different type of role where he’s quiet, awkward, kinda dumb, but well meaning. Also not for nothing but he somehow pulls off a strip club DJ type fashion sense seeming more natural than comical. Even kind of handsome.

Anyway he’s a guy who doesn’t know how to be smooth about it when he breaks the news that the show might be closing. Annette yells at him for ruining the night, but what was he supposed to do, not tell them?

Most of the movie takes place in the last two weeks of the show, before they’re completely replaced by the more hip and well-attended burlesque circus they’ve been sharing a space with for a while. They’re all trying to find new jobs but they have very different attitudes about it. Shelly stubbornly clings to the idea that Le Razzle Dazzle is classy, rattling off facts she’s obviously repeated for years about how popular and respected it was in the old days. When people still came. She takes it really personally when she finds out that Jodie watched the other show and thought it was really good, or when Mary-Anne admits that she considers Le Razzle Dazzle a shitty job she lowers herself to for the money. And she can’t help but sound like a judgmental prude when she sees the sexy moves Jodie had to do for an audition and says she would never take a job like that. But how much of that is her real feelings and how much is knowing she’s too old to be hired for that, or to learn it, is our guess.

We can also interpret for ourselves Shelly’s motives for calling her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd, Carrie Fisher’s daughter who was in THE FORCE AWAKENS/THE LAST JEDI/THE RISE OF SKYWALKER), a college student in Arizona who she did not raise. Hannah actually comes to visit but seems unsettled by the experience. Shelly acts very sweet but asks her questions like they just met (Did you declare a major yet?) and it’s just too much, she leaves very quickly, makes excuses not to stay for dinner.

A nice thing about Shelly is that she seems very sincere about loving what she does, considering herself an artist, an artsy type, encouraging other people to be creative and express themselves. Some people might laugh at her for feeling that way in her profession, but I relate. She encourages Hannah to pursue her passion for photography as opposed to the more practical career advice of the family friends who raised her. It’s a nice sentiment but also loaded with painful subtext since Shelly chose keeping that job over finding something compatible with raising a daughter. And that seems to be what goes through Hannah’s mind when she finally takes up Shelly’s offer to come see one of the last performances. Was it worth the sacrifice for Le Razzle Dazzle?

There’s other painful stuff here, more than I will reveal. Like a few Vegas stories it’s about the people who actually live there – you know, in houses, not hotels. Like most Vegas stories it’s about failure and regret and trying to dig out of holes, perhaps hopelessly. It’s about things specific to aging as a woman, including but not limited to the double standard that when the show ends Eddie just gets to stay on while the dancers don’t. The loss is sentimental for him, but not existential.

Of course I haven’t personally experienced this type of gender inequality, but there are other aspects of Shelly’s story that speak to me pretty specifically. I have none of the same problems as her except for the one where I chose an unusual career that has been fun but didn’t set me up for retirement and now I’ve been doing it for decades, I’m not sure how applicable the skills are to anything else so who the fuck would hire me if I needed a new job, and it’s too late for a normal grown up’s life if I ever wanted one. But I don’t think I did. (Sorry guys, I’m about to turn 50, the thoughts have been flowing. But I don’t have as many regrets as Shelly. ‘Cause I don’t live in Vegas.)

THE LAST SHOWGIRL is not a portrait of a brave woman we should admire as she faces adversity. Instead she’s just a complicated human, sympathetic but hugely flawed. We may look gracefully at the mistakes she made as a young single mother. That was the past. But in the present we see her being a total asshole to a surrogate daughter who shows up on her doorstep crying. A rare chance at a do-over that she absolutely fumbles.

With her own chance at a do-over, Anderson has done much better. It’s hard to imagine the role existing without her. And even in a sad movie there’s a meta aspect of warmth because here’s this lady we remember being a punchline and a tabloid target, the swimsuit lady from Baywatch in her Golden Globe nominated indie drama performance, and we can’t help but root for her to show those fuckers what’s what. Hell, I was rooting for her in BARB WIRE too but I didn’t think she pulled it off. This time she did.

This is the third film from director Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford (CAPTAIN EO). I haven’t seen PALO ALTO or MAINSTREAM because they didn’t star Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista, but I might some day. As one might expect from a Coppola, Gia made this fucking thing look stunning, shot on 16mm by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, a cinematographer of Haim videos who got into features with PALO ALTO and has more recently been celebrated for SINNERS. (Ryan Coogler actually wanted her to shoot that in 16mm until he found out it wouldn’t work for the twin FX.)

I’m not sure I quite like way it ends, with a too-good-to-be-true resolution I assume is supposed to be taken as fantasy. Maybe I need to be coddled, I need to believe a happy ending is possible. THE LAST SHOWGIRL is slight for sure, a little watercolor sketch of an indie movie, but I appreciate that about it. It’s a mix of sad and beautiful and beautifully sad. Like Vegas.