Pamela, a Love Story (now on Netflix) offers one, single, conspicuous point of view: Pamela Anderson’s. Once – and still, kind of – the subject of scads of greasy gossip and ugly tabloid headlines, Anderson joins the likes of Britney Spears and Monica Lewinsky as ’90s/’00s icons grasping control of their own stories, self-reclamation projects stemming from years and years of shabby treatment in pop-cultural discourse. Directed by Ryan White (Good Night Oppy, Ask Dr. Ruth), the documentary debuts alongside Anderson’s new memoir Love, Pamela, and shows the former Playboy model and Baywatch TV star in an emotionally vulnerable light.
PAMELA, A LOVE STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Pamela Anderson is going through boxes and boxes of – deep sigh, oh no, good grief – videotapes, almost certainly the one thing we associate with her the most. The irony isn’t lost on us, for damn sure. You won’t be surprised to learn that she documented a hell of a lot of her life with a video camera – maybe, at least in retrospect, one tape too many. They’re in storage at her home in Ladysmith, British Columbia, the very same island where she grew up. Her mother still lives there, and is her neighbor. Some things have changed: Pamela appears on camera wearing no makeup; she wears long, loose, flowing white dresses that give her an ethereal presence; she hops on a tractor and mows her own lawn. Some things maybe haven’t: She mows the lawn in high-heeled, knee-high boots; those long white dresses are pretty much see-through.
We’re subject to Pamela’s biography in vignettes framed in emotional language culled from her diaries; alongside the videos are stacks of yellow legal pads she used to write down many thoughts and feelings from a tumultuous life. She occasionally reads passages atop images from old photographs or home movies, speaking matter-of-factly about her mother and father, the latter of whom was an abusive alcoholic. We meet them briefly in new interviews before the narrative shifts back to Pamela’s voice. She speaks openly and plainly about the serial sexual abuse she endured by a babysitter when she was still of grade-school age, briefly mentions the how she was raped at age 12 by a 25-year-old man.
Some lucky exposure landed her a brief gig as a model for Labatt’s beer before she became the subject of a Playboy centerfold, which led to her headlining syndicated cheese-and-beefcake beach-lifeguard “drama” Baywatch. Her breakthrough stems from her decision to fight through the shyness, insecurity and shame spawned by the abuse she endured. She was officially a star, gritting her teeth and gracefully enduring the shameless, crassly sexist questions about her body parts and boyfriends, asked by tabloid journalists and the likes of Jay Leno and David Letterman, who come off as insensitive, leering jerks.
Then Pamela met badboy Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, and four days later, they were married. She calls it her “wildest, most beautiful love affair ever.” She’s had many love affairs; she mentions Scott Baio and Mario Van Peebles in the same sentence; she’s been married six times, and talks about her brief marriage to Kid Rock, and her even more brief marriage to poker star Rick Salomon. She loves being in love, she says. But Lee was the one who fathered her two children, and with whom she created a videotape that was intended to be for their eyes only. We know what happened next – she says, sometime during many months of construction workers having access to their home, a safe was stolen from their garage, and the sex tape became the subject of grueling legal battles and the first-ever viral internet video. Sometimes, in the middle of the documentary, Pamela questions why she’s rehashing all of her life’s painful moments, but she ultimately lands on this: “It’s good to get it out once or twice in your own words – in my own words.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pamela, a Love Story is the intimate Val Kilmer autobio-diary Val meets Lewinsky-produced doc 15 Minutes of Shame meets Framing Britney Spears.
Performance Worth Watching: Most inspiring in this all-Pamela-all-the-time doc is her impressive song-and-dance Broadway debut as Roxy in Chicago – we didn’t know she had it in her, although on second thought, maybe we actually did?
Memorable Dialogue: Pamela gets real about why anyone tuned in to Baywatch: “You could watch that show with the sound off.”
Sex and Skin: Lots of images from Pamela’s Playboy shoots.
Our Take: There’s a fine line between vanity and vulnerability, and Pamela, a Love Story indulges a bit of the former and a bit more of the latter. Pamela’s desire to set the record straight as she sees it feels consistently sincere. It also transcends simple self-promotion – for her book or future entertainment endeavors – in a few ways: It quietly eviscerates the notion that celebrities should shut up and endure invasions of their privacy and cheap shots from commentators because it’s the price of being rich and famous (Jay Leno comes off especially distasteful and mean-spirited in clips of Pamela’s appearances on The Tonight Show). It shows new shades of its subject’s character – her sense of humor, romanticism and wily self-awareness, how her naivete and world-weariness may be at odds with each other. And crucially, it humanizes a woman known primarily as a sex object and larger-than-life persona.
That doesn’t mean the documentary is particularly revelatory. The prevailing pre-internet media coverage of the time was so ubiquitous, even those of us who tried to avoid the sour exploitation of Pamela’s personal and professional ups and downs know more than we need to about her life. The film catches us up with her life now that the spotlight has faded – moving back to Canada, spending time with her adult sons Brandon and Dylan, doing a four-week Broadway stint in Chicago, getting married and divorced again, this time to/from her former bodyguard. Its candid nature arouses our interest in the life of a person in the twilight of intense, blinding fame, and paints a portrait of a woman who never got over her famous – and violent, and passionate – love affair with Tommy Lee. The doc captures Pamela’s reaction to the debut of Hulu miniseries Pam and Tommy – made without her or Lee’s consent – and we sense how it’s triggering some of the trauma from that tumultuous period. We also sense that she may live the rest of her life with a broken heart.
The film isn’t a deep-dive retrospective procedural seeking to connect the dots into a portrait of THE Pamela Anderson. Rather, it reflects her desire to share her real self, past and present, whether we see her lounging in her home at age 55, or in Playboy spreads at 25. Notably, the latter aren’t blurred out or censored in any way – we get Pamela as-is then and now, and she owns it without apology or explanation (not that she needs to offer either, mind you). She controls that portion of her story, and it’s the part she couldn’t control, the gross and enraging sex tape saga, that’s the real tragedy here.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Pamela, a Love Story doesn’t really tell us what we don’t already know. But it will endear audiences to Pamela Anderson, perhaps like never before – she deserves that much.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.