'Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields' A Review

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is a documentary about the titular celebrity. Split into a two-part miniseries(that is, in essence, a feature) a relatively straightforward, chronological account of her career unfolds through archive images and clips as well as talking head interviews centering around a current interview with Shields herself.

Shields reclaims and recontextualizes her story sharing her experiences and perceptions from her early career where she was sexualized as a child/juvenile in movies like Pretty Baby, Blue Lagoon, and Endless Love as well as a particularly charged Calvin Kline jeans ad campaign into her attending Princeton, later career on Broadway, Suddenly Susan, and advocacy. She also, somewhat, goes into her complicated relationship with her alcoholic mother/manager although the economics involved as well as her mother's culpability are only somewhat acknowledged. She and her childhood friend Laura Dern are very careful about not directly addressing causes, conditions, and motivations. Shields very solidly tells her story her way and that is focused almost solely on her specifically, about progress, hope, and growth(not a bad focus but it feels incomplete). This is somewhat in contrast with some of the expert talking-head interviews as well as the images that director Lana Wilson shows us. Not that this should be a hit-job on her mother or father or the white male directors, casting directors, producers, talk show hosts involved but above and beyond broad criticism of the patriarchy, brief snippets of conjecture and rebuke from the experts, and atrocious talk show clips, there is very little, ultimately, in the way of synthesis.

Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields is worth watching, I'm happy to bear witness to Shields story, to see her progress and celebrate her and I have compassion for her but there are only two moments that have real insight. In one scene Shields is informally talking to a producer about her thought processes after a sexual assault, in another Shields teen children challenger her on the artistic merit and validity of her early films and the family has a discussion. These scenes are getting to the heart of the matter. They are impactful. Much of the rest, although interesting, and deserved feels too polished, too manicured. And although, with her editing Wilson seems to condemn Shields childhood sexualization those images and scenes from those movies are presented throughout with very little explicit criticism.

Difficult, challenging, and thought-provoking if lacking a certain type of direct censure that some  might desire.

Currently streaming on Hulu.

Rent It.