The personal story of Britney Spears as a musician and a celebrity isn’t that interesting to me but this film’s focus is on the media’s reaction to Spears than the person herself. It won critical acclaim and no wonder, it is one of the rare activist documentaries to actually succeed in its objective. Shortly after it was released, a judge ordered an end to her father’s involvement in her conservatorship and it certainly seems that this film had a part to play in that decision, so that’s quite amazing.

This documentary was made without Spears’ participation and uses interviews from the people around her, such her friend and former assistant Felicia Culotta and record company executive Kim Kaiman who helped cultivate her image early in her career. It touches on some basic biographical facts but only to arrive at the circumstances behind her so-called breakdown. Factors include her breakup with Justin Timberlake and the subsequent hostility of the media towards her, possible postpartum depression after the birth of her second child and a custody dispute with Kevin Federline and finally being taken advantage of by her new manager Sam Lutfi. These problems were apparently serious enough that a judge approved her father Jamie Spears taking control of her life and finances under the conservatorship system. The concern is that this involuntary arrangement persisted for 14 years while Spears kept performing and earning the money that funded the whole thing. Spears herself did not publicly speak out against the system for a long time but her fans perceived a hidden message in her social media and started the #FreeBritney movement. This would eventually lead to this documentary itself and success at ending the conservatorship.

My summary here is couched in a lot of conditionals because so much of this is speculative. Without statements from Spears herself, her father, Federline or Lufti, all that is left is publicly available information and the guesses of third parties. This film’s intent is of course to frame the conservatorship as a gross miscarriage of justice and it does feel instinctively wrong to use that Spears’ own money is being spent to pay for the lawyers hired by Jamie Spears to act against her. Yet a judge did approve of the measure after looking at information unavailable to us and Spears did continue to work for many years under the arrangement. Clearly she could simply have refused to perform much earlier if she opposed it so strongly and despite some talk about how she isn’t in full control of her own social media accounts, she could make a definite public statement at any time if she really wanted to. My own guess is that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes and even if Spears disliked the conservatorship, she chose to cooperate with it at least for a time for reasons she kept to herself. On this count, it is questionable how much value this documentary has but I suppose the support of the fans and the publicity of the movement gives her more power over her situation.

The film is on more justifiable ground when it covers how horribly the media has treated her since her debut. We cringe now when we see hosts on mainstream news shows blatantly ask her questions about her breasts and decorum prevents her from excoriating them about it. It’s also amazing to catch a paparazzo squirming on camera as he tries to justify his intrusive presence by saying that she didn’t really tell them to leave her alone, as if she hasn’t made herself clear enough. Things are far better now of course and the release of this documentary resulted in a flood of belated apologies for past wrongdoings to Spears. Still this is an issue that goes beyond just Spears herself and it’s not quite the same topic as that of the conservatorship.

Overall this film isn’t as valuable as I thought it might be, relying as it does on such shaky foundations. It doesn’t even have much to say about the conservatorship program, not citing any other cases in which it has been used and to what effect. Perhaps serious issues of medical privacy make that difficult but it’s hard to have much of a conversation without more information. I suppose that many years from now people who are curious about the #FreeBritney movement was about would something to educate themselves with but that’s about all that it’s good for.