Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C+

I’m here to root or Pamela Anderson. It’s the reason I went to see The Last Showgirl, the first wide release film she’s been in that garnered her any real respect. And she deserves as much respect as anyone else. I just wish the movie were better.

Don’t get me wrong—I actually enjoyed it. Maybe more than it deserves. It’s not bad. It’s just . . . incompetent, maybe? This is the first of Gia Coppola’s films I have seen, and I find myself wondering if her previous films also featured narrative threads that ultimately went nowhere.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what I genuinely like about The Last Showgirl: it has empathy for its protagonist, while not necessarily endorsing her choices. Shelly (Pamela Anderson) has been working as a Las Vegas showgirl in the same show, called Le Razzle Dazzle, for four decades at least. She talks about how she was featured on the promotional materials last shot in the early eighties, which the show is still using now. This job is her life, and she is devastated to learn that the show is closing for good. She has a daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), with whom she is not close, because she left her to grow up in the care of one of Hannah’s friends’ parents.

But here’s where the writing in The Last Showgirl (by Kate Gersten) gets messy. It’s never made clear how or why neither of Hannah’s parents actually raised her. We learn relatively early on that the producer of the show, Eddie (Dave Bautista), is actually Hannah’s father. There’s a scene in which Hannah confronts Shelly, having come to see the show for the first time in her life, and challenges her to say why working in a topless Vegas show was worth more to her than raising her daughter. It’s a good question. Shelly’s response is to say she’s done defending herself, but she hasn’t done very much of that.

And one of the things The Last Showgirl actually does well is characterize the vibe of Las Vegas, the false hopes amidst its glitz, the place where dreams get lost in the shuffle. But Shelly has a singular passion for her work, which she romanticizes as something of great value of the past, even as the young women hanging out with her backstage note how things have changed. Shelly talks of how, as young Showgirls, “We were ambassadors!” To what, though? An idea of what Las Vegas once was to her, I guess. And to be clear, I love Las Vegas, and its parallel tracks of polished glamor and tacky sleaze. Coppola does not give us a clear picture of exactly which track Le Razzle Dazzle is on, or has ever been on.

There is a scene near the end, when we get a glimpse of the show, actually on stage, for the first time—it’s their final show, and all we really see are the women gliding across the stage in their elaborately bejeweled costumes. I will admit I got a sense of what Shelly had such pride for—something that a lot of work went into, at a high standard. In these last couple of weeks of the show, though, they repeatedly reference their rapidly dwindling audience, just a smattering of people in the house. It seems clear the show’s time has come.

Much has been made of Pamela Anderson’s performance in this film. I do want to give her the respect she deserves, but to say this is the best performance of her career does not set it above an exactly high bar. A slight majority of the time, she is very compelling, even with her pitched, girly voice and Shelly’s blindly selfish ambition. A bit too much of the time, her delivery is slightly off, giving an air of a self-conscious performer. A method actor, Pamela Anderson is not.

Anderson is surrounded by other actors who lift her up with their own gifts, most notably Jamie Lee Curtis as Annette, Shelly’s cocktail waitress best friend with a gambling problem. Curtis tears into her part with gusto, albeit with a striking similarity to her part as Carmen’s mom in the Hulu series The Bear (in which she is, frankly, much better—because the part is written much better). There’s also Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper from Mad Men, now 25, recently seen as the villain in the abysmal Red One) as Jodie, one of Shelly’s young cast mates. Shelly judges her for auditioning for another Vegas show she thinks has no class, though Jodie’s demonstration of a lusty dance with a chair in their dressing room is the most amusing scene in the movie. Shipka us actually quite good in this role, but for the fact that it has Jodie seeking maternal comfort from Shelly, Shelly coldly denying it, and the script never offering any resolution to their relationship.

It doesn’t seem like the greatest sign when it’s Dave Bautista who gives the best performance in a film. He’s actually got long-ish, salt and pepper hair parted in the middle, and his Eddie character is the most “regular guy” kind of character I’ve ever seen him play—somewhat impressive given how gigantic he is. Eddie is a very docile man who does not deserve to be treated the way Shelly treats him. And although The Last Showgirl doesn’t necessarily want us to agree with Shelly’s choices, it clearly wants us to root for her. And this is a challenge.

Ultimately, The Last Showgirl seems to exist solely to prove to the world that Pamela Anderson, herself age 57, is more than she seems at first glance. I’ll grant the credit that the film does exactly that. None of this makes her part in this a “great performance,” and it certainly doesn’t make it a great film. The relentlessly wobbly handheld cinematography alone—a choice I was baffled by—is enough to drive you to distraction. In spite of all that, I was compelled by the story from beginning to end, which in this unusual case was part of the problem: being compelled alone means little when so many of the narrative threads are dropped without resolution by the end. I get what Coppola was going for by finishing with Anderson’s final defiant, desperate smile onstage, but I left the theater with too many questions that should have been answered.

Overall: C+