Over the Hill

The Last Showgirl  a film by Gia Coppola.  Written by Kate Gersten.  With Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Billie Lourd, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Dave Bautista.  Streaming on Amazon and Apple.  *****

 Shelly (Pamela Anderson) has given her life to her career as a Las Vegas showgirl, dancing in a show called Le Razzle Dazzle, which supposedly has its roots in French culture.  When her adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) finally sees the show, after years of hearing about it, she says something to the effect of, “I thought it would be more complicated.  It’s just a bunch of women dancing around topless.”  In the brief smidgen of the show we finally see (at its last performance), Shelly is topless, but most of the women are not.  In any case, it was a show that, back when it started, was what people called risqué, which meant it was naughty but in good taste.  The men who came to see it weren’t there for the dancing.  They were there to see the boobs.

Now, quite suddenly, it’s coming to an end—the dancers have been given two weeks notice—and Shelly’s world is shattered.  It’s not only her source of income; it’s her whole identity.  It’s all disappearing.

Women who surround her are at both ends of their careers.  Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) are at the beginning; they can go on to the raunchier kind of dancing that is more popular now.  One of them demonstrates a dance she did for an audition, and Shelly can’t even bear to watch.  At the other end of the spectrum is Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), who used to dance with Shelly but was eventually let go; she now works as a cocktail waitress and drinks and gambles in her spare time, doing both things a little too much.  She says she likes her life.  None of these women have a 401K[1], and questions about the future are looming.  Annette thinks she’ll be able to waitress forever, but I’m not sure.

To an extent that I can’t remember in any previous film, I couldn’t get my mind off the actual lives of these performers, and how they mingled with the story.  Pamela Anderson became famous as a centerfold in Playboy, and went from there to an acting career, most notably on a show called Baywatch (which I never saw).  She’s 57 years old (an age she confessed to in the movie, in a rant after she was turned down in an audition), and I must say, she looks fabulous; she still has a beautiful body and a great pair of legs.  Jamie Lee Curtis intentionally makes herself look bad in this movie, with dreadful makeup to the extent that she wears any at all; I found her quite sexy when she was younger.  These are women who no doubt made a lot of money earlier in their careers, and probably still have some.  The Las Vegas women they portray are not so lucky.

The problem isn’t just that they’ve gotten old.  Their act looks like a relic; I would almost think it looked that way it 1987, when Shelly got started (Vegas has always been a little behind the times.  Wayne Newton wasn’t on the cutting edge).  We see a brief smidgen of the erotic circus that is replacing it, and it is raunchier, but it’s also funny and requires some talent.  The women are young.

In the late sixties, a show called “This Was Burlesque” toured the country, and I saw it a couple of times, once with my brother and once with some friends.  (The cast of that show later appeared in a movie called, “The Night They Raided Minsky’s.)  It too was a bunch of topless woman dancing, but there were also comedians and various novelty acts; it was titillating (pardon the expression) but didn’t make you feel sleazy.  Le Razzle Dazzle is like that.  The show that is replacing it is far raunchier.  But it wouldn’t seem so to modern audiences, who have access to hardcore porn all their lives.

For better or worse, Shelly is a true believer.  She sees herself as a dancer and thinks Le Razzle Dazzle is art.  She’s showing her boobs, but what the hell, she has beautiful boobs.  “Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars,” she says.  “We were ambassadors for style and grace.”  Later she says, “Feeling seen, feeling beautiful, that is powerful.  And I can’t imagine my life without it.”  She’s sacrificed everything for that.

Her early marriage ended when her husband got a job in New York.  She tried working there but couldn’t find anything that suited her like Las Vegas.  Her daughter, from a subsequent liaison, resents the sacrifices she had to make, sitting in the car playing video games while her mother performed.  Eventually she moved to an adoptive family.  Shelly can seem like a deluded fool for seeing herself as an artist in a grand European tradition.  I’m not sure she’s any more deluded than a lot of us, including performers of various kinds and any number of writers, myself no doubt included (John O’Hara, to pick an example at random, sincerely believed he should win the Nobel Prize).

Really this movie is about any number of people who devote themselves to work but find out eventually that not only are they too old to do it well, the work has changed in ways they don’t understand.[2]  People sometimes ask me how to get started as a writer, and I have to say I have no idea.  I can tell them how to have done it in 1978.

I felt for these women and identified with them.  The whole world is changing and so are they.  It was ever thus, as the expression goes.  That doesn’t make it any easier.  Kate Gerston’s script is sympathetic to the women, tightly written and beautifully done.  (I must say, I like a good ninety-minute movie.  They don’t all have to be two hours and fourteen minutes.)  The direction and acting are superb, a credit to director Gia Coppola.  Especially sympathetic, I thought, was a man named Eddie (Dave Bautista), who manages the show and once had a romance with Shelly.  He was the bearer of bad news in this situation, the messenger everyone wants to kill, but it isn’t his fault.  He wants to be Shelly’s friend.  But she’s not ready for friendship, at least not yet.

Four or five times as we watched, my wife turned to me and said, “This is heartbreaking.”  It was.  And is.

[1] I may have misheard, but I thought one of the women referred to it as a 501K.

[2] A whole generation of basketball coaches, including some great ones, just found that out.