We were distracted. For most of her life, Pamela Anderson was being upstaged by “Pamela Anderson.” Then Gia Coppola sent her a screenplay by Kate Gersten, and now Ms. Anderson, having given one of the finest performances of this or any year, has won awards from film festivals around the world and is in the middle of Academy Award conversations.
In “The Last Showgirl,” a remarkable film, Anderson plays Shelly, a dancer in the final few days of a dying Vegas revue. Much has been made of her apparent choice not to wear make-up, but as brave as it may have been, that’s hardly the most impressive thing about her work (and it turns out that Pamela Anderson without make-up is exactly as attractive as Pamela Anderson on the cover of Playboy. Tough luck.) She starts out by handling a chaotic and verbose dressing room scene with breathtaking skill and confidence and then, one scene after another, she keeps astonishing us. Around about the time she has a climactic scene with her daughter (played beautifully by Billie Lourd), you realize you’d been distracted. It’s not her make-up choice that’s fearless, it’s her acting.
Entertainment Weekly’s Maureen Lee Lenker wrote that, “’The Last Showgirl’ is a requiem for any woman who has ever been underestimated because of her beauty, her choices or her art” and Indiewire’s Kate Erbland wrote, “Pamela Anderson is the product of a profound underestimation of the star’s prodigious talents.”
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But Anderson isn’t just giving a great performance relative to expectations, she’s delivering a great performance relative to her peers, of which she now has few.
Aaron Sorkin is an Oscar-winning screenwriter, filmmaker, Emmy-winning TV creator and playwright, whose resume includes “The Social Network,” “The West Wing,” “Moneyball,” “Steve Jobs” and “A Few Good Men.”