‘The Last Showgirl’ review: Pamela Anderson, diamond in the rough

You may be just as surprised to find a Werner Herzog cameo in Pamela Anderson’s breezy 2023 memoir “Love, Pamela” as you’d be to her see in one of his films. Nevertheless, a potential collaboration nearly happened, and the German auteur gave the Canadian bombshell a few words of career guidance: Never audition — hold out for directors who see your worth.

And now, filmmaker Gia Coppola has constructed a dreamy character piece around Anderson and her dizzy megawatt grin. In “The Last Showgirl,” Anderson’s first solo lead in a movie since 1996’s “Barb Wire,” she plays Shelly, a veteran Las Vegas dancer accustomed to being a sex symbol. It’s part of the current yen for movies that erect a flimsy hall of mirrors around a female icon to reflect how pop culture has warped their image. (See also “The Substance,” elevated into an awards contender solely on the strength of Demi Moore’s backbone.) But this is not a blood-and-guts show business exposé — it’s a diaphanous portrait of a woman who, like Anderson herself, wafts through life like a marabou feather. It’s less a story than a vibe.

Coppola recently called Anderson the “Marilyn [Monroe] of our time” for her intellectual curiosity. Anderson might have grown up culture-starved in rural British Columbia, but she feasted on the French New Wave as soon as she could, and here, she does a pretty good job at acting as though she’s in a Godard film herself, piling her hair on top of her head à la Brigitte Bardot and gazing off toward, presumably, Las Vegas’ half-scale Eiffel Tower as we stare at her and hope things work out. Shelly, who speaks in a heightened version of Anderson’s breathy coo, is a fellow Francophile. To her, her longtime gig at the Razzle Dazzle isn’t just some tacky nudie show — it’s “the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture.”

Everyone else in Shelly’s orbit thinks the Razzle Dazzle is a tacky nudie show, including her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), her stage producer Eddie (Dave Bautista) and her younger, more cynical co-workers Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka).

We don’t see Shelly’s onstage routine until the last sequence, so for most of the film, we’re not sure whom to believe. The scenes are zingier if you laugh at Shelly’s artistic ambitions. (When she insists that the Razzle Dazzle’s glamour is undeniable, Mary-Anne quips, “I could deny the glamour.”) Yet, if you respect Shelly’s commitment, Kate Gersten’s script becomes more interesting. Rhinestones aren’t diamonds, but they still make a heavy crown.

Hollywood usually insists that people should follow their dreams — Shelly even gives that advice herself to Hannah, an aspiring photographer. But the movie asks a follow-up question: Even this foolish dream? Is it possible to see Anderson’s bedazzled creation in pink and orange feathers as not just feminine but also feminist? Is it feminist to cheer, “Go girl!” as someone follows her dream right off a cliff?

Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography looks at Shelly’s life the same way she does: What’s right in front is in focus, everything else is a blur. The truth is that Shelly can’t, or won’t, see her own future beyond the stage. She’s naive, but she’s no victim.

Coppola periodically reminds us that this sweetheart can also be selfish and mercurial and snobby. Waitressing is beneath her, the adjoining erotic circus is too low-class and, as for the Rockettes, she finds all that kicking “very redundant.” Early on, Eddie announces over the loudspeakers that the casino’s new owners have decided to shutter the failing Razzle Dazzle in favor of something more hip. As Eddie breaks the bad news, the sound mix rumbles with a whirring, subtextual whoomp whoomp whoomp: Oops, Shelly’s missed the last helicopter out of ‘Nam.

Anderson plays her real, as though she’s perhaps met variations of Shellys at Hugh Hefner’s grotto. She has a self-awareness that allows her to be at once sincere and girlish, while recognizing that strangers might find Shelly synthetic. Her Shelly is serious about her version of reality while not expecting others to conform to her delusions. Even Shelly’s mundane moments come with a tingle of the fantastical. Eating take-out Chinese with her daughter allows her to pretend she’s capable of normal relationships — one in which her pasties aren’t the priority. In actuality, Shelly can’t even get a date (and the one feint at romance is forced).

No one roots for an industry that chews up women. Yet how should we feel about a woman who keeps throwing herself in the meat grinder expecting to be reborn as filet mignon? One casting director (Jason Schwartzman) seems offended when Shelly tries to pass herself off as 36, about as long as she’s been shimmying in the show.

At 85 minutes, “The Last Showgirl” can feel as padded as a push-up bra; it’s trying to convince us that it’s a full-grown feature film. It lingers on shots of false eyelashes and foam rollers and slow-mo footage of Shelly posing on rooftops and street medians that grows increasingly ethereal and ridiculous.

I like that Shelly treats the kaleidoscopic desert sun like a spotlight — but would she really drive to an empty gravel lot to pose for no one? Some of the details feel marvelously resonant, especially how the off-the-clock Shelly never can scrub off every speck of glitter, or the way she keeps ripping her costume wings like some cabaret Icarus. The movie works hard to repeat the point that she’s a woman out of time. Her fondness for black-and-white musicals is lovely, but her retro Walkman goes too far (as does the VCR in the Razzle Dazzle’s break room).

But there’s truth in the idea that a person can freeze at the age they felt most confident. For Shelly, that means wearing acid-washed denim. Meanwhile, her older former colleague Annette (a giddy, scene-stealing Jamie Lee Curtis) sports frosted white lipstick and a hair color so bizarre you can’t imagine what it was labeled on the drug store box. (Gingerdead? Strawberry Futility?)

Curtis has some of my favorite lines in the movie (“What, do you think I have a 501k?”) plus a great burlesque sequence where she impulsively climbs onto a platform and gyrates to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for an apathetic casino crowd. It’s a long scene (gotta get your money’s worth of Bonnie Tyler) that goes on until the competing dings and chimes of the gaming machines break the spell. You could plop her performance into a big Hollywood comedy and it would work just as well.

Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect. For an encore, maybe she’ll finally work with Herzog.