DD: Words I never thought I’d hear our film critic Harlan Jacobson say: “Pamela Anderson is quite good in her new film The Last Showgirl. Harlan has some thoughts about the Oscar nominations that were announced Thursday, and the one Pamela Anderson didn’t get:
HJ: Truth is I wouldn’t be able to pick Pamela Anderson out of a two blondes lineup. I never watched Baywatch or Home Improvement on TV. And I didn’t begin to see her last two films, City Hunter in 2019, titled in the original French Nicky Larson et la parfum do Cupidon, about a French private eye hired to find Cupid’s Perfume, and SPF-18 a year earlier, a film I never heard of but was cast like a witness protection program for 80’s stars Molly Ringwald, Goldie Hawn, Roseanna Arquette, plus Keanu Reeves, the one star who tries to disappear and can’t.
So, if you guessed that I didn’t twist myself into a pretzel to see The Last Showgirl at the Toronto Film Festival last September, well the thought never crossed my mind.
Out in release now, it’s still not what I might call great cinema. About a Las Vegas showgirl trying to hang on to her role as star dancer of Le Razzle Dazzle, a joint slated to close because it no longer does either, The Last Showgirl hits all the tired script notes of a Hallmark Movie with Boobs. The 30-foot obelisk outside Le Razzle Dazzle that the camera pointedly returns to is of her.
The Last Showgirl – Roadside Attractions
Shelly Gardner, her character, says she’s 36 in an audition that frames the gradual fading out of her gig, confesses without prompting to being 42, and is actually 57, about Anderson’s age when she made the film for Gia Coppola, Francis’ son, written by Kate Gersten, who is married to Matthew Shire, son of Talia Shire, neé Coppola. This is a Coppola family project built around Anderson, who was the Playboy Covergirl 14 times, its centerfold once, and the subject — seen in its best light, which few do — about the raw deal the working class gets in Las Vegas values America.
Anderson was far from nominated this week for her good performance. She is the embodiment of the Trump Mom, a working-class Barbie who dreamt of glamour, got a tacky piece of it, captured the attention of countless strip joint fans, married and got dumped by one, until one day she doesn’t. She’s forgotten. No money no safety net, a daughter whom she gave up for showgirl lights, no friends. Eddie, the sad guy show manager played by wrestler Dave Bautista, is her rock, as she struggles with the death of Beauty, touching because she loved it so, and tragic because she depended on it. It goes away, you know.
Anderson was overlooked for a nomination by the Academy for a variety of reasons, but in no small part because Demi Moore nominated for her role as Elizabeth Sparkle, a discarded TV star in The Substance — about a deal with the devil to stay beautiful that has high-tech DNA taken from Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray – got there first. The Substance, from the Cannes film festival, has better everything: a harder-edged screenplay, great performances and direction, and yet, thematically The Last Showgirl and The Substance are in the same Sister-neighborhood.
The Substance – Mubi
The Awards Season nominations start with the somewhat shadowy, rarely-seen-in-public National Board of Review, proceeds on to the various critics groups, the Golden Globes, The Critics Choice Awards, a broadcast group of which I am a voting member, then the various guilds—Screen Actors, Directors, Writers, and the Bafta Awards in Britain — all culminating in and supposedly influencing the Oscars on March 2nd, resolutely committed to being last, after who won what in 2024 will be long forgotten. There’s a whole industry handicapping the Oscars and all these sidebars that bears high resemblance to my Dad at a sad sack horse track mumbling to himself and poring over the Daily Racing Form to make sense of more stats than baseball, where the nag has run, how many furlongs off the pace, whether the horse could be claimed afterwards, the size of the purse, and whether the track was slick or muddy. In Hollywood terms the track is always both slick and muddy.
None of the predictive odds—what past percentage of Directors Guild vs. Bafta winners went on to win the Oscar – are worth knowing unless you’re the one nominated. As my father also used to say, “The emPHAsis is on the wrong syLLAble:” What links the nominees? What is in the cultural ether that slipped across the unconscious or accidental membrane of film to show us what’s current in the culture? In a year that professionals complained lacked heft, 2024 yielded a crop of very good films that drew nominations about artists and social rebels colliding with, disrupting, leading or dying at the hands of the society they challenge: The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Anora, Emilia Perez, The Substance, the snubbed Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria, even the hoham Conclave with its last-minute lefthand turn from a papal election drama in a political election year to something else that relates to our ongoing Western obsessions. Not all the films overlapped, but enough did to be a film year inflected by artists and outliers trying to move, lead, survive or just outrun the crushing prevailing order.
When Hollywood looks at itself, it almost always makes the audience want to burn the place down – not for its elitism, as is widely reported – but for its relentless questions about our humanity. Shelly Gardner in the unnominated Last Showgirl and Elizabeth Sparkle in the five times nominated The Substance are variations on the old joke about Stanley, the accountant who gives up everything—wife, kids, house, money, friends—to run away one day and join the circus. When the circus circles back three years later to town, his wife finds him cleaning up elephant poop behind the main tent. “Come home, Stanley,” she says, “all is forgiven.” “What,” Stanley says, “and leave show business?”
And I’m Harlan Jacobson.
DD: More form Harlan on the Oscars at WBGO.org, Harlan drops in remotely on the Sundance Film festival competition films, to see which ones might come to a theater or TV near you later this year.
