Review of “The Last Showgirl” – Pamela Anderson’s big comeback is a big disappointment | Toronto Film Festival 2024

TThe desire to see Pamela Anderson hand over her flowers after being mistreated and vilified by numerous quarters—from the media to men in the industry to Hulu—is strong enough to initially outweigh other concerns about her big-screen comeback. To say it that way is an understatement, as the star has never landed a leading role as dramatic as she did in the Las Vegas-set character drama The Last Showgirl. It's a truly big moment for Anderson, after she regained control of her story with a well-received role in Chicago on Broadway and a likable Netflix documentary that allowed her to right some wrongs.

Yet while her goodwill has brought her here to a posh premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, it can only get her so far. The film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter Gia, is not at all worthy of the hype that might have preceded it. At just 85 minutes, it's a forgettable, empty trifle that doesn't give us enough of anything and certainly, sadly, doesn't showcase Anderson's chops as a dramatic actress. It would undeniably be a challenge for even the best actors to make much of TV writer Kate Gersten's bland script, but for her, the challenge is truly insurmountable. It's an embarrassing misjudgement of her performance, the star lapses into the same silly sitcom excesses she employed in her short-lived comedy series Stacked, relying on manic overemphasis regardless of the occasion. She just can't make any of it work, and Coppola seems almost aware of this, filling her film with ponderous, dialogue-free scenes where the character looks wistfully into the distance. Well-shot but dramatically sluggish, these moments are indicative of the film as a whole, which searches for meaning in nothingness.

In theory, there should be accessible emotion here, Anderson playing a woman experiencing the end of a career defined by her sexuality and grappling with what comes next. Shelley is a Las Vegas showgirl whose life has been defined by her work, to the detriment of everything else, including her estranged daughter (Billie Lourd), and now she must figure out who she is without her long-running show. It's a similar formula to The Wrestler, a film that also served as a comeback vehicle for star Mickey Rourke, but there was structure and soul, as well as a more experienced performer to build the whole thing around.

Coppola certainly knows how to mimic the all-American Sundance indie aesthetic, and also gives her film a stirring, often quite beautiful score, courtesy of Miike Snow frontman and Mark Ronson collaborator Andrew Wyatt (she also recruited Miley Cyrus for a big, bold closing number). But compelling images and stirring music can only do so much. Garsten's rough writing is neither detailed nor profound, and – rather bluntly for a character study – there is no actual character for Anderson to take on, just the idea of ​​one (I'd argue that Gina Gershon's long-serving dancer in Showgirls has more substance than Shelley).

The comments on gender and age seem light and nonspecific, and the world of Las Vegas showgirls is created from too great a distance to be truly believable. The city has become a popular destination for those telling tales of tormented people in the outskirts, for obvious reasons, but we never really get deep into the heart of it here, mostly viewed from faraway rooftops. Shelley's world is inhabited by her fellow showgirls (played by Brenda Song and a particularly convincing Kiernan Shipka, who is maturing into a fine young actor) and her best friend, a cocktail waitress (played by Jamie Lee Curtis as a sassy comedian who does… a lot). But those relationships are as superficially drawn as Shelley, and at times oddly dead-end, as if an earlier version of the film had been carelessly spliced ​​together (a scene in which a crying Shipka pleads for help has no introduction or resolution, while an odd sequence in which Curtis dances to Bonnie Tyler is indulgent and inexplicable). Even the scenes in which Shelley tries to rebuild a relationship with her daughter are flat and overly familiar, giving us little reason to get emotionally invested in what might happen. The best performance comes from Dave Bautista as Shelley's former lover, who also runs her stage show. The former wrestler develops into a surprisingly thoughtful character actor.

But the film rests almost entirely on Anderson's shoulders, and while the appeal of such a gamble is certainly enough to draw a curious, packed festival audience, it just doesn't seem like a fair ask of such an unprepared actress. She remains a star who deserves a happy ending, but The Last Showgirl isn't the showstopper it should have been.

“The Last Showgirl” is screening at the Toronto Film Festival and is looking for a distributor