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Pamela, a love story review: surprisingly vanilla rendition of a life in the spotlight

Pamela Anderson tells her 'own story' in Netflix's documentary - Netflix
Pamela Anderson tells her 'own story' in Netflix's documentary - Netflix

Pamela Anderson posed for her first Playboy shoot aged 22. She recorded the event in her diary: “Shy at first, by the end of the week you had to stop me from running out the door naked.” And so sex bomb Pammie was born. She became an international star in Baywatch before her career was blighted when a sex tape with 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 and monetised the video all those years ago, but from last year’s Disney+ drama miniseries Pam & Tommy, which repackaged the sex tape scandal as entertainment without bothering to ask for Anderson’s permission.

You can’t blame Anderson for making a film in which she calls the shots. She comes across as sweet and self-aware, with an ability to laugh at herself. There is a surprising absence of vanity, as she spends the entire film without a scrap of make-up. Show me another famous woman who would do that.

She speaks eloquently about the fall-out from that tape, which was filmed on their honeymoon (they had known each other for a grand total of four days before getting married), and how it proved disastrous for her but only bolstered the rock star reputation of Lee, drummer with Mötley Crüe. The theft and distribution of the video “felt like a rape”, she says, a choice of words that can’t be dismissed when Anderson has told us, earlier in the film, that she was raped by a 25-year-old when she was 12.

Generally, though, the documentary is very vanilla. Anderson is so keen to distance herself from her old Jessica Rabbit image that she is endlessly filmed wafting around her garden in a cotton slip dress, picking flowers, like an escapee from a White Company advert (although in her one concession to glamour, she does wear heeled wellies). At times it edges towards the saccharine. The director asks no challenging questions, and the only other people to appear in the film are Anderson’s supportive sons, Brandon and Dylan.

The presence of the boys could be the reason why Anderson doesn’t have a bad word to say about Lee, who remains the love of her life despite the four husbands that have come and gone since. In fact, one comes and goes during the course of the film, but is barely remarked upon. Lee was jailed for assaulting Anderson while she was holding their baby. To her credit, Anderson took the kids and left him, but she still goes misty-eyed when poring over home movie footage of their time together. Those tapes play a big part in Pamela, a love story, as do the diaries that Anderson has kept throughout her life.

Anderson has returned to her childhood home on Vancouver Island, where Harry and Meghan first fled after leaving the royal fold, a coincidence of location which lends itself to comparisons between this and the recent Harry & Meghan documentary on Netflix. The big difference is that, despite the public trashing and paparazzi intrusion, Anderson displays not a trace of bitterness.


On Netflix now