"Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields" Ain't Gonna Bite the Hands that Fed her
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields's two-part documentary is a by-the-numbers video memoir of a corporate industrial entertainment industry member. The documentary's structure reminds me of the late 90's early 2000's VH1 Behind the Music docuseries without the juicy details. Director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) combines interviews with Brooke Shields and some of her closest friends, including actors Laura Linney (Ozark) and Ali Wentworth (Living Color and wife of George Stephanopoulos, who is also a producer of the film) who knew the model/actor when they were children.
In part one, we get the origin story. Born a beautiful baby, her mother, who moved to New York City from Newark, New Jersey, in the early 60s with a high school education and a yearning to be famous, never looked back. Shields points out that her mother, Terry, had a high school education and could charm her way into a job at the cosmetics counter at a high-end department store in Manhattan without any experience. She starts dating Brooke's father, Francis, who is tall, dark, and handsome, and ends up getting pregnant. Her father, a man of honor, insists they marry, and Terry begrudgingly becomes a suburban housewife. But when she has her baby, she sees how she's birthed a star and gets that girl into commercials. The documentary chronicles the story of a girl who books her first job in the entertainment industry at eleven months old and becomes one of the first actual teenage sex symbols in America.
Watching this film is surreal. Shields requests that we ignore what we see in the archival footage and believe her when she says that her mother wasn't a stage mother and protected her from the middle-aged men in the industry who placed an underage girl in inappropriate on-camera sexualized situations for profit. For much of the documentary, Brook Shields narrates her story firsthand. It is fascinating to see a person in the public eye for her entire life, starting as an infant. The truth of this documentary lies in the subtext and the history.
The documentary doesn't mention that Brooke Shields's Grandfather, Francis Xavier Shields Sr., was an aristocrat, tennis star, and actor who had roles in seven films in the 1930s. Her father, Francis Jr., was an executive at Revlon. How many doors did that connection open for Terry and her daughter at Ad agencies in NYC in the 1970s?
The documentary works hard to reflect that Terry worked hard to manage her daughter's career and that Brooke loved to be the breadwinner for the family. Feminist experts are co-narrators giving the audience the social context of the 70s and 80s. They frame the adultification of young girls in fashion and entertainment as pushback to the feminist movement in the 1960s. There's an exciting part of the documentary where they point out that the first sex symbols in Hollywood were full-grown women with women's bodies, like Sophia Loren and Jane Mansfield. The film points out that Marilyn Monroe was a size 14.
This setup makes Brooke Shields's story even more disturbing. I was a kid in the 70s and remembered the attention that Brooke Shields got. Even then, mothers shook their heads at Terry Shields for placing her daughter in those age-inappropriate films and ads for profit. In the 1978 Historical drama Pretty Baby, Shields is 11. She plays an 11-year-old daughter of a sex worker, played by Susan Sarandon, whose virginity is auctioned off to a group of adult men. Keith Carradine was 27 when he shot the film and has love scenes with the 11-year-old child. As Shields recounts the trauma connected to all of the roles that required adult-level intimacy for a child actor, you can see her categorizing and trying to justify the situation.
Seeing how little anyone around this child cared for her well-being is upsetting. She was underage partying with adults at Studio 54, and it was normal. It's hard to see all of the sexualization of Shields as a little girl and not feel like her mother knew exactly what was going on and cared more about having money and fame through her daughter since she did not make it as a model when she was young.
As Shields recounts her life, she is still glassy-eyed, and as an adult, she is complicit as she justifies the distorted system that monetizes her virginity. The clips of older men like Merv Griffin interviewing Brooke are simply disgusting. The documentary has a very White Anglo-Saxon Privileged air about it. Instead of giving specific accounts of Terry’s alcoholism, they make vague references to it.
In part two of the documentary, we learn that Brook Shields was smart enough to get into Princeton, and she could have earned a degree in something that had nothing to do with the entertainment industry, but she didn't. She was a college graduate and went back into the industry only to continue the abuse and be raped by someone who had power in the entertainment industry. She describes the assault but doesn't name who the person was. When she speaks about this trauma, she speaks about how she internalized it and justified it instead of any process she’s done to heal that trauma or stop that person from doing it to some other female actor. Nope, the focus is justifying the financial reason for being quiet.
The high point of the documentary is when Shields shares her experience with postpartum depression, and Tom Cruise publicly shames her. Shields handling of this situation was a high point of this documentary. Finally, she stands up for herself against the system. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields doesn’t have the guts to be anything but nice and pretty. This documentary left me with a deeper destain for the corporate industrial entertainment industry and those who justify making money over ethics.
2.5 out of 5 stars
Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premiered at the Sundance 2023 Film Festival.
