By The Last Showgirl (2024) is not really a story so much as an arrangement of melancholy poses. Pamela Anderson walks through casinos, wanders around the Las Vegas Strip, and stares into the distance while director Gia Coppola waits for sadness to materialize around her. Occasionally, it does. More often, the film simply feels empty.
Anderson plays Shelly Gardner, a 57-year-old showgirl who has performed in the same French-style Las Vegas revue for three decades. The costumes are covered in rhinestones and plumes. The women perform (mostly) topless. Shelly does not view any of this as cheap entertainment. She sees herself as the guardian of an elegant artistic tradition.
Then Shelly learns that the revue will close in two weeks. Its audience has disappeared, and a newer, more sexually explicit production has taken over its most profitable nights. The younger dancers begin looking for other work, but Shelly has few options. She has spent most of her adult life performing in a show that no longer has a place in modern Las Vegas.
Shelly, like many aging entertainers, helplessly watches the cultural value of her profession disappear. If you devote your life to an art form that the world no longer values, does that make the work itself meaningless? What happens when a person builds an identity around beauty, only to discover that both the beauty and the entertainment industry surrounding it have an expiration date?
Unfortunately, The Last Showgirl does little with these questions.
The film’s most interesting contribution may be its connection between the American showgirl and the European revue tradition. Le Razzle Dazzle, Shelly’s fictional production, is modeled after the elaborate French-style spectacles that once dominated the Las Vegas Strip. The real Jubilee!, which inspired screenwriter Kate Gersten, was the last major classical showgirl production in Las Vegas when it closed in 2016. These productions descended from Parisian cabarets like the Lido and the Folies Bergère, where plumes, nudity, choreography, and enormous costumes created a very particular kind of theatrical fantasy.
The Last Showgirl (2024)
The tradition also has a close relative in Argentina’s teatro de revista, where the vedette became an equally recognizable figure. Buenos Aires venues like the Teatro Maipo helped establish the Argentine revue during the early 20th century, eventually showcasing famous vedettes such as Susana Giménez and Moria Casán. Argentina’s official history of the Teatro Maipo demonstrates just how important the revue once was to the country’s popular culture.
I have seen the decline of this entertainment tradition for myself in Argentina. Even within the last decade, revues and the vedettes who headline them have become less culturally prominent. The form still exists, but it no longer occupies the same place in popular entertainment. Younger audiences have different expectations, while enormous costumes and large theatrical companies are expensive to maintain.
This gives The Last Showgirl a subject with relevance far beyond Las Vegas. Shelly represents artists who survive long enough to watch the world move on without them. The problem is that Coppola treats this decline as a mood instead of an idea. The film presents faded casinos, empty dressing rooms, and aging performers, but it rarely examines what any of them mean.
Shelly has sacrificed her relationship with her daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), for her career. She has little money and no meaningful retirement plan. She insists that her work represents class and sophistication, even as everyone around her sees it as hopelessly outdated. These contradictions should make Shelly fascinating. Instead, the film repeats them without developing them.
There are moments when The Last Showgirl resembles Special Treatment, another film about an aging woman trapped inside a profession that defines how other people see her. However, Special Treatment gives its protagonist a complicated interior life. Shelly rarely feels like more than a symbol of faded glamour.
Much of the film depends on Pamela Anderson’s ability to communicate everything the screenplay leaves unsaid. She has an undeniable vulnerability that makes her appropriate for the role, especially given the obvious parallels between Shelly’s life and Anderson’s own public image. Both women became famous in industries that treated their bodies as commodities, and both reached an age at which the culture began reconsidering what they might have to offer beyond physical beauty.
Those parallels are more interesting than Anderson’s actual performance. She’s not terrible, but she struggles to carry such a sparse film on her shoulders. Her performance largely consists of breathy dialogue, nervous smiles, emotional outbursts, and long stretches of looking forlornly into the distance. Coppola photographs her with great sympathy, but sympathetic photography is not the same thing as characterization.
Jamie Lee Curtis adds even less as Annette, Shelly’s friend and a former showgirl who now works as a cocktail waitress. Curtis gets a conspicuous dance sequence that is supposed to communicate defiance, desperation, and the indignity of aging in Las Vegas. Instead, it feels like an isolated acting exercise inserted to give Curtis something memorable to do. Annette never becomes a fully realized counterpoint to Shelly, even though she could have represented the future Shelly is desperately trying to avoid.
The Last Showgirl (2024)
Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka play younger dancers who look toward the future with more pragmatism than Shelly, but they primarily exist to remind her that the next generation will adapt while she cannot.
Coppola’s dreamy visual style initially suits the material. Las Vegas appears washed out and strangely lifeless, as if the city itself has grown tired of maintaining the fantasy. But the soft focus, fragmented editing, and contemplative shots soon become repetitive. The film is less than 90 minutes long, yet it frequently feels stretched beyond the limits of its story.
Films like The Great Beauty use an aging protagonist to examine an entire culture in decline. The Last Showgirl has the opportunity to do something similar with Las Vegas, the revue, and the commodification of women’s bodies. It could ask whether Shelly has been exploited, empowered, or some uncomfortable combination of the two. It could explore whether preserving a dying art form is admirable or merely an inability to change. Instead, it settles for watching Pamela Anderson walk around the Strip looking sad.
The decline of the traditional showgirl is a compelling subject. Shelly’s predicament is also inherently tragic. She has given everything to an art form that cannot love her back, and now that the curtain is coming down, she has no idea who she is without it.
There is a thoughtful film somewhere inside that premise. The Last Showgirl never finds it.
The Last Showgirl (2024) Movie Rating: ★★½ out of 5
If you’d like to watch The Last Showgirl (2024), the film is currently available to stream, rent, or purchase via Amazon
The post The Last Showgirl (2024), An Interesting Subject in Search of a Film appeared first on Philosophy in Film.
