Another of Coppola dynasty has become a director. Well she’s been a director for awhile, but this might be the one that gives her some fame, just like Lost In Translation gave her aunt Sophia her a taste of fame.
Fame as well as motherhood is, perhaps, one of the themes of this movie. I don’t think it was a revelation, but I think Pamela Anderson was more than a little good. It’s another one of those performances that is almost startling because you would never associate this actress with the Baywatch actress, or the big breasted girl who was first discovered on a Jumbotron at a football game, nor the woman who starred in her own sex tape with Tommy Lee.
As I’ve said before, all art is about the artist. It can’t be any other way because artistry demands sacrifice and this is where the theme of failed motherhood comes in. The character, Shelly, has a daughter who she has never really raised, preferring to devote her life to being a showgirl, and understandably there is a great deal of bitterness between the two. She has also never revealed who the father is — Dave Bautista — a man she sees every day because he is the stage manager of her show.
The show, called the Razzle Dazzle, is and has been failing, being gradually replaced by something called the Hot Circus. Shelly has been playing this role for 30 years, since she was 22, and although you kind of know what it is, it isn’t really until the very end of the film that we finally see the full show in all its Las Vegas tackiness. There’s something terribly sad about a character who has given so much for something so banal and awful. It’s like a writer, perhaps myself, who slaves away at a novel that turns out to be an absolute bore, or even incomprehensible, but not in a good way like Thomas Pynchon.
Jamie Lee Curtis is always brave in her roles — one that immediately comes to mind is the absolute horror of an Italian mother she played on The Bear. In this it is no different. In a locker room scene you see how much she is trying to keep her body together — to look sexy, even though she’s gained too much weight to really pull it off. She was one of the razzle dazzle dancers, but now she is cocktailing and basically letting men play grab ass for tips. She doesn’t care. But in one particular hard to watch scene, she dances alone on a podium, and doesn’t seem to turn even a single head. She looks pathetic.