Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields

“Pretty Baby” isn’t always pretty in chronicling everything that Shields endured, but in terms of placing a spotlight on the media excesses that surrounded and defined her rise to fame, it is, with the benefit of hindsight, pretty amazing indeed.

A supremely well-crafted piece of conventional documentary portraiture. It invests each chapter of Brooke Shields’ life with more thought and depth and archival coverage than we’ve seen before, and it never loses sight of the larger story it’s telling.

The end result is a complicated portrait not just of a pretty face but of a deeply resilient spirit.

Though the documentary doesn’t reinvent the genre—it stitches together talking head interviews, home videos, film footage, and photographs—its straightforward nature makes the facts and emotional urgency all the more stark. They don’t need to over-stylize the aesthetics; Shields’ drama is eye-popping enough as it is.

What does seem clear is that Brooke Shields has emerged from decades in the harsh glare of the spotlight and some heavy trials and tribulations as one tremendously impressive person.

The moments that most reveal how far she has come are those with her family. When her daughters talk to her about their views on her early sexualized roles, we can feel how meaningful it is to her to give them the kind of ownership of their voices she had to work so hard to achieve.

Where Pretty Baby really shines is in the theoretical framing brought on by authors, journalists, lecturers, and sociologists. Names like Meenakshi Durham, Scaachi Koul, and Jean Kilbourne – author of The Lolita Effect, Senior Culture Writer at Buzzfeed, and media literacy lecturer, respectively – turn the whirlwind life of a child star into a case study for women’s position within the western patriarchal society, further twisted by the visual power of the last century’s consumerist turn.

There are elements here that hint at a better template. ... The best scene in the documentary, by a wide margin, is a dinner in which Shields and her daughters try to make sense of what was progressive and what was regressive about her early career; it’s funny, relaxed and still welcomely analytical. That scene is a blueprint for the type of unstaged or differently staged approach that could have elevated the documentary from being solid and interesting to truly revelatory.

There’s too much thematic repetition in the second episode, but this is an absorbing profile, with unexpected interviewees (Laura Linney has been a friend since childhood). It leaves you rooting for Brooke: the child she was and the woman she became.

While no one should have to excavate decades of pain to tee up a compelling documentary, that Shields is never truly pressed regarding some of the bigger questions of her life — particularly in the first part of the doc, which is dedicated to her childhood and youth — leaves the entire endeavor feeling oddly fractured, a wholly incomplete portrait.