By: Alex Tilton

Spoilers ahead.

There are a lot of movies about the death of a dream. A grand plan that never comes to fruition, a turn on the trail that destroys a carefully crafted future etc. It’s all familiar stuff. But I haven’t seen many stories about when a dream simply runs its course and…ends.

The Last Showgirl tells the tale of the end of a career long since in decline. Our main character, Shelly Gardner (Pamela Anderson), finds out that (at the age of 57) she’s out of a job. She’s been a dancer in an old-fashioned revue show at a Las Vegas casino for thirty years, and declining ticket sales have motivated the casino owners to replace the revue with a newer style show more popular with modern audiences.

Shelly hasn’t had an easy life by any stretch. She’s got an estranged daughter that was fathered by her producer Eddie (Dave Bautista), and raised mostly by friends in Arizona because she was too busy with her career to care for a child. She’s not wealthy, she’s not famous, and she knows she’ll never get another job as a performer because of her age. This is all made clear within the first act.

The next two acts are a superb character study. Shelly tries to figure out a next chapter that doesn’t involve serving cocktails to gamblers, only to eventually admit she doesn’t have any other choice. She watches her friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) hit bottom and lose everything to her gambling habit, having lost her place as a dancer in the show with Shelly long ago. Shelly’s daughter visits her, visibly disgusted by what her mother chose as a career in lieu of raising her, and forces Shelly to reckon with the reality of having given up her child for a back-row dancing gig that never promised enough material reward to support her when the show inevitably ended.

She goes to an audition that ends predictably given her age and the fact that she hasn’t auditioned in three decades. The producer of the show she’s trying out for isn’t mean to her, but he does lay out the bare bones of her situation in plain English. She got hired for a revue show decades ago because she was young and pretty, and the industry doesn’t have any jobs for a stage dancer pushing sixty. She deals with bitterness toward Eddie stemming from the fact that while the female dancers are all scrambling to find work, he (as a producer) can simply stay where he is and keep doing what he’s been doing.

It’s one of the most grounded and painfully realistic films I’ve ever seen. Other reviews have described TLS as a tribute to the working class of Las Vegas. And certainly, it is that. But I feel like this story could’ve been set any number of places. Entertainment isn’t the only industry infamous for treating women as interchangeable and disposable. This is a story about waking up from a fantasy to confront reality, and what happens when you ignore the warning signs and wait too long to pivot.

I genuinely can’t find anything to complain about here. Dave Bautista’s part might’ve benefitted from a better actor than Dave Bautista, but I have to admit that he was a good choice for the part of a simple guy who wishes he could stop the inevitable, and knows that he can’t. He cares about the dancers, he hates what’s happening to them, and he has no ability whatsoever to change it. He does a good job of communicating that feeling throughout the film, and if this is a sign of things to come for this actor, then good.

But the big winner is obviously Pamela Anderson. Her IMDB page indicates that she’s kept busy over the years but this is, at long last, her breakout role. A serious part that required serious skills and a life experience that matched the character. They couldn’t have done better casting this part.

So, this is a strong recommendation from me. It’s a very sobering movie, but a very beautiful one also. The kind of thing that makes you think about it for a long while afterwards. Obnoxious CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) spam may rule the box office, but it’s nice to know that they’re still making movies about people.

Image Source: IMDb.com