One of Those

 

Some movies have a potency built inside them that can't be unpacked with words or even thoughts. They just have it somehow, and it's not plot or cinematography or even performance that sends a film into this territory: it's a tone inherent in the subject matter maybe, and how the actors and everyone else take that subject matter on and hold it so dearly in their hearts and brains that the movie they make together becomes bigger than what they even thought they could accomplish. Like kindred souls combining into a mutual dream caused by honoring what they love.

The Last Showgirl is one of those. The plot, about the last days of a showgirl's professional life on the Vegas strip, kind of feels a little cliche, reminiscent of other loser movies like The Wrestler or The Whale, but Pamela Anderson's face and demeanor and glow (as she portrays Shelly, the main character) make you take all that back. In fact, her face is the plot of The Last Showgirl:  wan, wrinkled, shiny with old makeup, but furiously alive and trying so hard to be the face she needs it to be. Her beauty and its ghost are housed in that face, a spooky beautiful realization shining from that face that all the effort and energy she spent in the last 30 or so years in pursuit of her dream as a dancer and an artist was kind of a joke she played on herself. Where do you go after that?

You keep trying.  You take what you can get. You move on. 

Jamie Lee Curtis's turn as the best friend who has already lost it all gives the movie both a foil character and an acrid butterfly. Her face, as well, reveals years and years of loss and excuses and drinking and building a fortress of solitude you only leave when you get evicted because you took the rent money with you to the casino. Jamie Lee's dedication to getting this character right is another contribution to that sense of potency I mention above: you are in the presence of greatness because the greatness is in service to something terribly sad and beautiful and small.

"Terribly sad and beautiful and small" is this movie's tone and impulse and tagline really. You are in an atmosphere of forgiveness when you give yourself over to it. You are washed in that same light Shelly feels when she finally makes it to the stage in one of her awkward showgirl outfits. You're baptized in cheap light and yet exulted and elevated too. Changed by the realization that nothing really matters outside of making it through.