Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields (2023)
dir. Lana Wilson
Rated: TV-MA
image: ©2023 ABC News Studios
Almost from the start of Lana Wilson’s intimate yet sprawling portrait of the life and career of model and actress Brooke Shields, it becomes apparent that the director wants to use her subject to dig deep into the psychology of the culture that produced a figure like Shields. It’s also quickly apparent that Shields – who was used for the purposes of others long before she had the slightest bit of agency in the matter – is a willing and enthusiastic conspirator in the project.
Together the two women have crafted a searing indictment of how our society did, and, more importantly, still does, treat woman solely as sexual objects for the gratification of straight men. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields also manages to present its subject as a whole person. By the end of the film, we feel we’ve seen Ms. Shields from every angle of her personality. It should be no surprise that this thoughtful and careful examination is infinitely more fulfilling than what those early in Shields’s career coveted her for, namely her beauty and her body.
The documentary, which premiered in January at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, is available to stream on Hulu as a two-part miniseries, each episode running a little over an hour. I’m not sure why Wilson – or maybe it was Hulu – decided to break it up this way. With a little editing, Pretty Baby’s 138 minutes could have been streamlined into a more conventional 120- or 130-minute feature film. But this is a small quibble, considering the breadth and depth of Wilson’s quality filmmaking.
The documentary takes its title from the movie that made Shields a sensation at the tender age of thirteen, the 1978 Louis Malle historical drama Pretty Baby. Set in New Orleans’s red-light district in 1917, the picture is based on the real-life account of a woman forced into prostitution at the age of twelve by her mother, who was also a sex worker.
Malle’s Pretty Baby was controversial at the time, with cultural critics questioning the decision to put the adolescent Shields in such a sexualized role. As Wilson’s documentary Pretty Baby unfolds, it becomes clear that while some people voiced objection, the culture-at-large – dominated as it was by straight, white men – couldn’t get enough.
Wilson further complicates the issue by calling attention to the possibility that producer, production designer, and screenwriter Polly Platt, who adapted the screenplay for Pretty Baby, was herself trying to critique the male gaze and the society that would allow something like a 12-year-old prostitute.
It’s here where Wilson dives into her own critique of 1970s misogyny in society and its echoes through to today. The 1970s saw the explosion of second-wave feminism with the help of figures like Gloria Steinem – if you’re interested in exploring the topic in contemporary entertainment, check out FX’s excellent limited series, Mrs. America, starring the phenomenal Rose Byrne as Steinem.
Wilson interviews feminist cultural critics who make the point that as women of this era began insisting on their own autonomy and self-determination, the reactionary backlash (because reactionary backlashes are as sure as death and taxes) was swift and ugly. If women were unwilling to fill the submissive and docile role that men had prescribed for them to this point, then men would simply refocus their sexual desires and attentions on girls, who had even less agency than adult women.
Thus, we see a sexualization of pubescent and even pre-pubescent girls in the culture. Wilson gives us copious examples, showing us images of younger and younger girls made to look sexually desirable in everything from school-girl uniforms to pajamas practically made to look like lingerie.
Enter Brooke Shields. After her meteoric rise to fame in Pretty Baby, Shields went on to star in the 1980 hit The Blue Lagoon, about two teens shipwrecked, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a deserted island and their subsequent sexual awakening. The archival interview segments that Wilson includes in her documentary, in which one after another male interviewer gushes over how beautiful this 15-year-old girl is, will make your skin crawl.
The same can be said for the infamous Richard Avedon-helmed Calvin Klein jeans ad campaign which featured Brooke – at age 15 – ostensibly selling denim by being posed in numerous barely-disguised sexual positions. For her part, and as a way to acknowledge her own agency, Shields speaks about the photo shoot being a positive experience. It was an opportunity to explore and strengthen her modeling craft, and, according to her, Avedon was a creative partner with her throughout the photo shoot.
Shields’s mother and manager, Teri, was determined to make her daughter a star, booking Brooke on a soap commercial as a toddler. During the Pretty Baby controversy, Wilson examines how much of the discourse revolved around shaming Teri for putting her daughter in the position in the first place. The critiques conveniently ignored the larger misogynistic society, which finds pleasure in sexualizing and objectifying women, in favor of attacking one woman.
Wilson, and, more importantly, Shields, candidly explores Teri’s alcoholism and codependence to paint a complicated portrait of the dominant figure in Brooke’s life until Teri’s 2012 death. The film acknowledges the complicated dynamic between mother and daughter; it’s some of the most personal interview moments with Shields in a documentary filled with them.
The second half of Pretty Baby switches gears slightly. It focuses more heavily on the biographical details of Shields’s life after she graduated from Princeton in the late 1980s. After her rocket to fame early in life, Shields felt she needed to prove something – not only to her mother, but also to the rest of the world – and the latter half of Pretty Baby documents her determination to do precisely that, starting with attending an Ivy League school.
Shields is devastatingly open about the traumas of her past. She speaks candidly – although, frustratingly (but understandably), she refuses to name names – about being raped by a colleague during what she thought was to be a discussion about an upcoming acting project. She also details her whirlwind romance and short-lived marriage to tennis superstar Andre Agassi, which ended, according to Shields, after his controlling and mercurial behavior became too much for her to bear.
There is also a triumphant passage chronicling Shields’s second act (or third, or fourth, depending on how you’re counting) bringing much needed attention to the issue of postpartum depression, which she suffered after the birth of her first daughter. Her 2006 book, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, was a seminal text in bringing the cultural discussion around the topic to fruition. Tom Cruise even put his nonsense religious beliefs on blast when he publicly attacked Shields for championing psychiatry and antidepressants in helping her overcome her depression.
Near the end of Pretty Baby, we see a family dinner with Shields, her husband, Chris Henchy, and their two daughters. In many documentaries, these kinds of slice-of-life sequences feel contrived; you get the sense the only reason the conversation is happening is because a camera is present. That couldn’t be further from the case here. Shields and her daughters have a candid conversation about the movies that propelled the matriarch to stardom, and how the attitudes towards sex within them have aged over time. The girls, both in their late-teens, express dismay that their mom was put in such compromising positions at such a young age.
You can see on Shields’s face that she agrees to some extent, but that, for her, it’s more complicated. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields explores that complication with wonderful nuance. It’s an enlightening study of a woman who has shaped the cultural conversation – sometimes without her consent – for decades and who hopes to continue to shape it into the future.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Director Lana Wilson explores not only Shields’s life and times, but also the culture that the actress helped shape. Her film is a wonderful example of empathy and nuance in the issues it explores.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Pretty Baby is able to successfully avoid the pitfalls of a talking head-style documentary by using copious amounts of archival footage of Shields throughout her career in order to successfully break up what could have been an unending string of interviews.
- I loved seeing some of Shields’s closest friends speak about her. Laura Linney and, someone else who knows a little something about childhood stardom, Drew Barrymore, are notable highlights. I feel like we need a Drew Barrymore doc along the same lines as this one.
- Everybody give it up for a special appearance from Judd Nelson, who costarred with Shields on her late-90s sitcom, Suddenly Susan. That show was basically my introduction to her work as an actress.
- I’ll never tire of revisiting Shields’s guest turn on the sitcom Friends.
- The Blue Lagoon is a blind spot for me. Should I correct this?
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at home on the couch via my Hulu subscription.