Pamela Anderson Breaks Free of the Glitz of Las Vegas

Gia Coppola The Last Dancer is a dreamy, wistful portrait of a veteran Las Vegas dancer recovering from the news that her career is over. The film is as thin as a veil, like the wings that the main character, Shelly, played by Pamela Anderson with a sense of raw pain, keeps tearing from her costume. The story often recedes rather than advances, favoring atmosphere over substance in too many wordless sequences in which we watch Shelly wander or dance or simply stare into the abyss in sun-drenched parking lots, on rooftops and on the street, bathed in lens flare and Andrew Wyatt's shimmering score.

After his promising debut in 2013 Palo Alto and his second year stumbles seven years later with MainstreamCoppola seems more than ever in awe of the impressionistic style of Aunt Sophia. But the new film, written by Kate Gersten, a member of the Coppola clan by marriage, can't compare to the penetrating emotional intimacy of, say, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation OR Priscillaeven if the raw study of the character at the center of the book constantly increases its emotion.

The first time Shelly shows up to a dance audition wearing a jaunty hat whose crystal beads seem like a calculated attempt to draw attention away from her age, Shelly is a thirty-something veteran of a glittering revue called The Razzle Dazzlethe last survivor on the Las Vegas Strip of an old-time entertainment colorfully described as a “boobs and feathers show.” But that steady job is about to be taken away from her as the show goes the way of the dinosaurs, to be replaced by a sexy burlesque circus.

Even though she's been moved to the back of the stage, surrounded by dancers decades younger than her, Shelly's identity has remained inextricably entwined with the revue. She goes haywire when stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), with whom she has a history, drops the bombshell that they'll be closing in two weeks.

For Shelly, The Razzle Dazzle She belongs to a venerable history of entertainment that dates back to the postwar Lido cabarets of Paris. She sees herself as an ambassador for that legacy. To her younger colleagues like Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Marianne (Brenda Song), who gravitate toward Shelly almost as a mother figure, she's just a job, or a way to leave home and achieve financial independence.

Even more contemptuous is Shelly's college-age daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). She eventually accepts her mother's invitation to see the magazine in her final days, calling it cheap trash and dismantling Shelly's delusional claims of historical significance by dismissing it as “a nudist show.”

It's a sign of how deep Shelly's personal investment is in The Razzle Dazzle she runs so fast that she furiously runs out of the dressing room and risks going back to square one in an attempt to mend her relationship with Hannah, who can't stand her mother's choice to parade around with rhinestones every night instead of being a stable presence in her daughter's life.

A different perspective on aging, jobless women, whose top requirements are “sexy and young,” comes from Shelly's old friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a former dancer now serving cocktails on the casino floor and missing shifts to fresher faces. Annette has seen it all, delivering loud, world-weary commentary while chugging margaritas. But when she, like Jodie, turns to Shelly for help, Shelly is too wrapped up in her own existential crisis to have time for them.

Another performance from Curtis' wig period, Annette sees her become even bigger than Donna, a pickled mess of a mother on The bearShe looks like a tanning bed accident, with her caked-on aquamarine eyeshadow, satin lip gloss, and shag haircut that probably dates back to the '80s. Her workplace meltdown, which blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, sees her step uninvited onto a mini-podium in her tacky red-and-gold bellhop uniform and perform a sad, sensual dance to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as casino patrons walk by without paying attention.

Both Annette as a character and Curtis' pantomime take us out of a film that Coppola clearly conceived as a soulful and sensitive alternative to the garish screen representations of similar milieus, such as Show Girls AND BurlesqueEven the courage of a scene in the staff locker room in which Curtis refuses to hide the appearance of a half-naked 65-year-old body turns the actress's vanity-free performance into its own kind of vanity gimmick.

The film is on steadier ground when it sticks close to Shelly, inevitably veering into meta territory as it finds the overlap between the showgirl's glory days fading into obsolescence and Anderson's recent transition away from the Look at the bay girl with the makeup-free candor of a fifty-year-old who doesn't want to be a slave to unrealistic standards of female beauty.

While Marilyn’s whispery voice and constant, nervous verbal diarrhea are sometimes thin, Anderson’s transformative performance is undeniably touching, offering illuminating insights into both the character and the actress who plays her, who has had to fight to be taken seriously. This role should be a turning point on that front.

Shipka also impresses as a young woman who seems coolly in control until her choices are realized; her demonstration of the moves required of dancers in the erotic circus is hilarious. Lourd walks the difficult line of a daughter afraid to let her mother, who she calls Shelly, never Mom, into her life but who also longs for closeness. The real surprise is Bautista, who shows a new depth of feeling as a gentle, caring man whose respect for Shelly is still tinged with romantic affection.

Coppola's cousin, Jason Schwartzman, makes a brief appearance as a director driven to brutal honesty when Shelly becomes hysterical, demanding to know why her audition (for Pat Benatar's “Shadows of the Night”) “wasn't what we were looking for.”

Although The Last Dancer Overall it appears slight, more consistently attentive to aesthetics and atmosphere than to psychological depth, there is a touching empathy in the portrait of Shelly and women like her, their sense of self crumbling as they are cruelly devalued.