Shelley is still beautiful, but when we first see her, auditioning for a new job, the camera looks up to capture her slackening jawline. Wearing sequins, feathers and tons of makeup on stage, off-stage Shelley is bare-faced, and looks like anyone else at the grocery store. Throughout, Anderson adopts a baby-doll voice that does wonders to convey the girlish dreams Shelley has never let go of. Annette looks like a caricature of a tough broad, with a shag haircut, a hideous spray tan and frosted lipstick. Curtis plays her as a woman with utter confidence in who she is.
With a sophisticated use of point of view, the film allows us to see Las Vegas in the romanticised way Shelley does, still glittering. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography is soft and beautiful. There are no glaring stock views of the neon Vegas strip. We see Shelley in the brightly lit dressing room or rushing to the stage with the other showgirls in their elaborate costumes. But we also see, more clearly than Shelley, that their rhinestone headdresses and feathers belong to a show that has become, as a younger dancer says, “a dinosaur”.
A few sharply drawn characters, including two younger showgirls, help reveal how dreamily unrealistic Shelley is. Kiernan Shipka plays Jodie, who is 19 and thinks of her dancing as a lark. Brenda Song is Marianne, already hardened, who says, “It’s a job. And it pays American dollars.” Shelley remains wide-eyed, insisting that their show, called Le Razzle Dazzle, matters, and has a heritage going back to the Lido cabaret in Paris. “No one cares,” Marianne tells her. The Razzle Dazzle is being replaced by a sexy circus, which, as we see in one comic scene, includes a stripper who also spins plates.
Billie Lourd is tough and moving as Hannah, Shelley’s hostile, college-age daughter, whom she often neglected as a child and hasn’t seen in a year. She takes Shelley up on her offer to see the revue, then goes backstage and calls it a “stupid nudie show” and “lame trash”. Lourd makes it clear that Hannah is hurt, not malicious.
