Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields

For the most part, this is more of the traditional talking-head-and-clips documentary. That format works, though, because of the fact that Shields is so open about all of the fascinating aspects of her life.

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.

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.

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’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.

“Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” plays out like a VH1 “Behind the Music” episode. We watch a young talent caught up in forces bigger than herself, reach a dizzying peak, a crisis, and ultimately, a happy ending. Nothing much is revealed in the two-parter we don’t already know.