Pamela Anderson posed for her first Playboy shoot at the age of 22. She noted the event in her diary: “Shy at first, by the end of the week you had to stop me running out the door naked.” And so sex bomb Pammie was born. She became an international star in Baywatch before her career was destroyed when a sex tape featuring then-husband Tommy Lee was stolen and turned into the world’s first viral video.
Pamela, A Love Story is Anderson’s attempt to reclaim her own story – not just from the people who stole the video all those years ago and monetized it, but from last year as well. Disney+ Miniseries Pam & Tommywho repackaged the sex tape scandal as entertainment without bothering to ask Anderson’s permission.
You can’t blame Anderson for making a movie where she’s in control. She comes across as sweet and self-assured, with the ability to laugh at herself. There is a surprising absence of vanity as she goes through the entire movie without an ounce of makeup. Show me another famous woman who would do that.
She speaks eloquently of the fallout from that tape, which was filmed during their honeymoon (they knew each other for a total of four days before getting married), and how it turned out to be disastrous for her, but only cemented her rock star reputation. van Lee, drummer with Mötley Crüe. The theft and distribution of the video “felt like rape,” she says, a choice of words that cannot be rejected when Anderson tells us earlier in the movie that she was raped by a 25-year-old when she was 12.
Overall, though, the documentary is very vanilla. Anderson is so eager to move away from her old Jessica Rabbit image that she’s endlessly filmed floating through her garden in a cotton slip, picking flowers, like an escapee from a White Company ad (although in her only concession to glamor does wear boots with heels). Sometimes it borders on the saccharin. The director doesn’t ask provocative questions, and the only other people who appear in the movie are Anderson’s supporting sons, Brandon and Dylan.