The Last Showgirl

Ask most older people about their age and most will say that no matter how they look on the outside, or even if they are physically slowing up, that they still feel in their 20s at heart.

That’s how it is for Shelley (Pamela Anderson). After three decades working as a showgirl in Le Razzle Dazzle on the Vegas strip. The cloth wings and rhinestones are a long way from the Bolshoi but she still talks about it as though she’s living in a fairy tale romance. Even her phone ringtone - Saint-Saens’ The Aquarium from Carnival of The Animals - suggests sparkle but she looks like a faded Tinkerbell whose pixie dust has long left the building.

Her friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, skating right on edge of caricature with her mahogany tan and pale Eighties-style lipstick), gave it up long ago in favour of cocktail waitressing at the casino, where gambling makes her heart flutter and abducts her tips from her. “I’m gonna work, then I’m gonna work some more, then I’m gonna die,” she tells Shelley’s younger dance colleagues Marianne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) at an impromptu house party.

Shelley has been determined to shine on, however, even favouring the job over raising her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). Now, as Hannah nears graduation, Annette finds herself trying desperately to reconnect at the same time as she hears from Dave Bautista’s soft-hearted stage manager Eddie that the show is about to close.

The script marks a step up from TV shows for Kate Gertsen (The Good Place, Mozart In The Jungle) and she brings a lot of verve to the dialogue, especially in early scenes where talk of the price of lemons mixes with costume snagging and general conversation as the dancers scramble about backstage, captured with grace by cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw. But while Gertsen proves sure-footed in the melee, her characterisations lack the detail in the film's more quiet moments to fully sell the emotional beats.

Anderson, for her part, acquits herself well, bringing an edge of panic to the perpetually sunny-side-up Shelley as she finds the illusions she has carefully crafted for herself start to crumble. The supporting cast are uniformly strong, particularly Bautista, who brings a real soulfulness to his role and Jason Schwarzman (Coppola’s cousin), enjoying a sharply written cameo.

Coppola has style, but sometimes employs too much of it. While gauzy shots of longing, where rhinestones blend with the Vegas lights as Shelley gazes out at the city, work to a degree, repetition weakens them. Also, there are times when she could hold the moment to greater effect. A scene which deftly employs Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart is delivering poignant goods when she cuts away to a second character. While this is presumably to make her point more forcefully, it marks just one of several on-the-nose moments that would be better left for the audience to draw their own connections. While Coppola captures some of the essence of an industry that is always on the look out for what’s new and sexy rather than what has gone before but it could use more grit and less gloss.