TORONTO – Las Vegas is more than the familiar strip of hotels and casino resorts that dominate the city skyline. Its heart and soul – and, yes, it has one – are the people who work in this mostly unconventional city. They may work the blackjack tables, bartend, or perform for their supper six nights a week, but for all the glitz and glamour this is a union town. If you stick around enough, the blue-collar grittiness shines through. Many of these residents have worked for decades on the night shift. They have raised their kids while performing in the same show night after night. They have pretty much seen it all. Gia Coppola’s new poetic drama “The Last Showgirl,” a world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, focuses on one of these lifers and her horrifying realization that the dream is coming to an end.
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Our heroine, Shelly (Pamela Anderson, has been a showgirl in the “Razzle Dazzle” revue, a “tits and ass show” on the Vegas strip, for 37 years. She’s the last remaining member of the original cast but thrives off the energy of her younger castmates, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, a ray of light) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, more please). Just 19, Jodie sees Shelly as a mother figure, which makes the veteran dancer visibly uncomfortable.
Her best friend, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis doing wonderful Jamie Lee Curtis things), left the show six years ago and is barely surviving as a cocktail waitress. Seemingly always with a drink in her hand and spray-tanned for the gods, Annette partially owes her money troubles to a gambling fix. Still, she’s a warning of what can go wrong when pretty fades and the paychecks stop coming in. That is if Shelly was paying attention.
When the show’s stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista, impressively grounded), gives the girls a heads up that “Razzle Dazzle” is on the verge of closing, Shelly goes into shock. Somehow, she never saw the writing on the wall when the show started sharing the theater with a high-end circus act, and her performances were cut down to four days a week. At 57, she has no idea what she will do next. This has been her life for almost four decades.
Jodie and Mary-Anne immediately start auditioning for other roles with little luck. Despite effectively appearing topless for years, Shelly is appalled at the “trashy” “Hedonistic Circus” show that Jodie has auditioned for. Her perspective of how classy “Razzle Dazzle” is or isn’t is warped by her love of the stage lights.
Complicating matters is Shelly’s relationship with her college-age daughter Hannah (Billie Lord, sadly miscast). Wanting to reconnect, Shelly reaches out to her, hoping for any ray of light as she endures a two-week countdown to the end of her showgirl career. Hannah shocks Shelly by stopping by, but she is apprehensive about meeting up with the biological mother she refers to only by her first name. It’s never clear what exactly happened, but at some point, when Hannah was very young, Shelly asked friends (likely a former “Razzle” castmate) to raise Hannah for her. She simply couldn’t afford a sitter with all those night gigs. She made a choice. The choice was “Razzle,” and she made peace with it.
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As the days to the end of the revue tick away, Shelly begins to spiral. The facades of her relationships with Hannah and Eddie, in particular, begin to crumble. Even the reliable Annette, a steady hand always there for her, has crashed and needs Shelly more than ever.
For most of the film, Anderson has played her role, for lack of a better description, as very demure, very mindful. It’s been mostly a quiet, confident performance. Shelly has her own set of street smarts but has almost lived her entire life in this Vegas strip bubble. When the bubble pops, Anderson unleashes an unforeseen wave of emotion encapsulating Shelly’s pain. Many may have recognized that Anderson was an underrated actress before “The Last Showgirl.” That being said, few believed she could project this from deep within her soul. Describing it as a revelation may be a stretch, but it’s damn close.
Coppola packs a lot into the film’s 85-minute runtime, but in many ways, the complete experience feels like a slight tease. There is more to explore. There are other portions of Shelly’s life or Coppola’s increasingly poetic perspective of Vegas itself that are calling. But some moments overcome the film’s thin narrative facade and not just Anderson’s triumphant climax, either. When Curtis, as Annette, walks onto a betting table in the middle of a casino and starts dancing to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” throwing her job away as visitors barely notice, you know there is something special here. You just wish there was more of it. [B-]
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