Gia Coppola has made three feature films in 10 years: Palo Alto, Mainstream, and The Last Showgirl, out now in theaters that aren’t in New York or Los Angeles. Her latest has received the most attention and lived the longest life of all her movies so far: 2014’s Palo Alto was adapted from a short story collection by James Franco and went nowhere (even before the allegations, no one was convinced of his having any talent besides being a decent Hollywood actor); 2020’s Mainstream was scuttled like so many others for obvious reasons; but now The Last Showgirl has arrived.
Since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in early September, Pamela Anderson’s performance has been preceded by pull quotes and blurbs that scream OSCAR CAMPAIGN and a series of promotional appearances on her own and with other likely nominees. Gia Coppola, like Babygirl writer/director Halina Reijn, isn’t making the rounds and getting the views that their stars are; Anderson and Nicole Kidman are superstars, but why aren’t they with their collaborators? It may be because in both cases, they’re the ones holding these movies up. If film is closest to architecture in its actual production, Babygirl and The Last Showgirl are helplessly leaky huts, unable to suppress the ire of people who braved the cold and ice to waste 90 minutes on a bad movie.
Both movies died in the theater when I saw them, especially The Last Showgirl. Anderson’s good in the role, but Kate Gersten’s screenplay is theater-in- the-park-bullshit, totally amateur and unacceptable for a film playing in hundreds of theaters—at least as Coppola and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shot it. Coppola’s still shooting golden hour montages of her characters wandering around the location and looking pensive as the handheld camera whirls around them with absolutely no purpose at all. These interludes would’ve made fine commercials in 2011, but sitting in a decently packed theater in early-2025, it just felt insulting. Coppola’s direction is lifeless and she loses the audience within 20 minutes, if that; Arkapaw can barely keep her subjects in focus, using long lenses with very short depths of field and shooting on 16mm. Miranda July’s Kajillionaire had a similar look, but executed properly.
Anderson hasn’t acted in a long time. She told the San Francisco Chronicle, “I’ve been handed a lot of scripts in my life, but never a challenge like this. You don't see parts like this when you're working in your bathing suit. I was so drawn to the character, I heard her voice in my head and pictured everything. I thought, 'Oh! This is that thing people talk about when they read material and know they have to do it.”
She’s as good as she can be with a script this sophomoric and threadbare; what the press for The Last Showgirl shows is that Anderson is simply another recipient of the American Media Absolution, whether she wants it or not (the same thing has taken place recently with Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, and, if he’s lucky, Mel Gibson). I’ve been blown away by how many self-described liberals and “leftists” have said things like, “I was BLOWN AWAY by how much Pam Anderson knew about movies in her Criterion Closet video.” Why, because she used to be photographed in a bikini? Because she made a sex tape with Tommy Lee? Why wouldn’t Anderson know who Abbas Kiarostami is, per se? I’m all ears…
The Last Showgirl is a lousy, inert movie, but it’s an occasion to rehabilitate—as if she needed it, as if she did anything wrong—Anderson’s image in the eyes of the pop culture establishment. The movie will be remembered for its ancillary promotional efforts, Anderson’s decision to go with as little makeup as possible, and, if it comes to pass, the beginning of a new career for her in America, one that’s more “acceptable,” one that liberals who used to ogle and bleat over her with as much lust and venom as all the right-wingers they refuse to talk to, can finally tolerate and, their precious consciences sated, accept back into their lives.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith