Pamela Anderson Peels Away the Vegas Glitz

Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a dreamy, melancholy portrait of a veteran Las Vegas dancer reeling from the news that her career has hit its expiration date. The movie is as gossamer-thin as the wings that the title character, Shelly — played by Pamela Anderson with an undiluted sense of heartbreak — keeps tearing on her stage costume. The story more often drifts than advances, favoring ambience over substance in a few too many wordless sequences observing Shelly wandering or dancing or just staring into the abyss in sun-blasted parking lots, on rooftops and streets, bathed in lens flare and the shimmering score of Andrew Wyatt.

After her promising 2013 feature debut Palo Alto and her sophomore stumble seven years later with Mainstream, Coppola seems more in thrall than ever to the impressionistic style of Aunt Sofia. But the new film — written by Kate Gersten, a Coppola clan member by marriage — can’t compare to the piercing emotional intimacy of, say, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation or Priscilla, even if the raw character study at its center steadily builds poignancy.

First seen rolling up for a dance audition in a jaunty cap whose crystal beading seems a calculated bid to draw attention away from her age, Shelly is a 30-year veteran of a spangly revue called Le Razzle Dazzle, the last survivor on the Vegas Strip of a yesteryear entertainment quaintly described as a “tits and feathers show.” But that steady job is about to be yanked out from under her as the performance goes the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced by a sexy burlesque circus.

Even though she’s been shuffled to the back of the stage, surrounded by dancers decades younger, Shelly’s identity has remained inextricably intertwined with the revue. She goes into a tailspin when stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), with whom she has a personal history, drops the bombshell that they are closing in two weeks.

For Shelly, Le Razzle Dazzle belongs to a venerable entertainment history that stretches back to the Paris Lido cabaret acts born in the postwar years. She sees herself as an ambassador for that heritage. For her younger colleagues like Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song), who gravitate toward Shelly almost as a maternal figure, it’s just a job, or a way to leave home and gain financial independence.

Even more dismissive is Shelly’s college-age daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). She finally accepts her mother’s invitation to see the revue in its closing days, calling it lame trash and dismantling Shelly’s delusional claims of historical significance by belittling it as “a nudie show.”

It’s a sign of how deep Shelly’s personal investment in Le Razzle Dazzle runs that she storms out of her dressing room and risks landing back at square one in her efforts to mend fences with Hannah, who resents her mother’s choice to parade around in rhinestones every night instead of being a stable presence in her daughter’s life.

A different perspective on women aging out of work for which “sexy and young” are the chief requirements comes from Shelly’s old friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a former showgirl now serving cocktails on the casino floor and losing shifts to fresher faces. Annette has seen it all, providing loud, world-weary commentary while sucking down margaritas. But when she, like Jodie, turns to Shelly for help, the latter is too caught up in her existential crisis to have time for them.

Another performance from Curtis’ wig period, Annette sees her go even larger than Donna, the pickled mess of a mother on The Bear. She looks like a tanning bed accident, with her caked on aquamarine eye shadow, frosted lip gloss and a shag cut that probably dates back to the ‘80s. Her meltdown at work, which blurs the line between fantasy and reality, has her stepping up, uninvited, onto a mini-podium in her tacky red and gold bellhop uniform and launching into a sad, sexual dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” as casino customers walk by paying no attention.

Both Annette as a character and Curtis’ pantomime take on her jolt us out of a movie Coppola has clearly conceived as a soulful, sensitive alternative to gaudy screen depictions of similar milieus, like Showgirls and Burlesque. Even the gutsiness of a staff locker room scene in which Curtis refuses to conceal what a near-naked 65-year-old body looks like makes the actress’ no-vanity performance into its own kind of vanity gimmick.

The movie is on steadier ground when it stays close to Shelly, inevitably inching into meta territory as it finds the overlap between the showgirl’s glory days fading into obsolescence and Anderson’s transition of late away from the Baywatch babe to the makeup-free candor of a late-50s unwilling to be a slave to unrealistic standards for female beauty.

If the breathy Marilyn voice and constant, nervous verbal diarrhea wear thin at times, Anderson’s transformative performance is undeniably affecting, offering illuminating insights into both the character and the actress playing her, who has had to struggle to be taken seriously. This role should mark a turning point on that front.

Shipka also makes an impression as a young woman who seems coolly self-possessed until realizations about her choices sink in; her demonstration of the moves required of dancers in the erotic circus is hilarious. Lourd walks the tricky line of a daughter wary of letting her mother — whom she calls Shelly, never mom — into her life but at the same time craving closeness. The real surprise is Bautista, who displays a new depth of feeling as a kind, caring man whose respect for Shelly is still tinged with romantic affection.

Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman makes a brief appearance as a director pushed to brutal honesty when Shelly gets hysterical, demanding to know why her audition (to Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night”) was “not what we’re looking for.”

Even if The Last Showgirl feels slender overall, more consistently attentive to aesthetics and atmosphere than psychological profundity, there’s moving empathy in its portrait of Shelly and women like her, their sense of self crumbling as they become cruelly devalued.