Warm and generous performances carry this good-natured movie from director Gia Coppola; it’s actually the sort of approachable, actor-led drama for grownups that pundits complain Hollywood doesn’t produce any more. Pamela Anderson stars as Shelly, a middle-aged Las Vegas showgirl and 30-year veteran of a cheesy spectacle called Le Razzle Dazzle, gamely putting on the feathers and the sparkly rhinestones and revealing costumes alongside dancers in their teens – all for dwindling audiences who are looking for novelties and more overtly sexualised shows elsewhere.
Shelly is stunned to learn that the show is getting canned and must now figure out what to do with her life and how to repair relations with her grownup daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), who always felt she came second in her mother’s life to the pseudo-glamour of her nudie showbiz vocation. It is a film about families, adoptive families and ersatz families; the director is famously the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and a cousin to producer Matthew Shire, who is married to the film’s screenwriter Karen Gersten, but this is a film with more than nepo status.
Jamie Lee Curtis is forthright and humorous as Shelly’s pal Annette, a former dancer who got out years ago and is now a cocktail waitress with a gambling problem: she has a great, almost semi-hallucinatory setpiece rocking out solo on the casino floor to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. (Maybe the film should have been all about her.) Dave Bautista is Eddie, the show’s lighting director, a big, gruff guy who can’t easily talk about his feelings for Shelly. Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song are Jodie and Mary-Ann, two young dancers who are angry and hurt when Shelly rejects the quasi-mom role they insist on creating for her – and Jason Schwartzman (another Coppola cousin) plays the cruel director for whom Shelly must humiliatingly audition to get another job.
Coppola and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw create interestingly ruminative outdoor sequences for Shelly, brooding in the harsh sunshine of the Vegas strip in the daylight that doesn’t get let in on the magic – although the big confrontation scenes with Hannah and Eddie are a little contrived, as is their implied final reconciliation. It is a strong turn from Anderson, though, whose fans are entitled to wonder if it is she, and not Demi Moore, who deserves this year’s “comeback queen” crown.
• The Last Showgirl is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 February.
