Since February of this year, five documentaries have been released surrounding the fraught legal battles concerning Britney Spears and the #FreeBritney movement. BBC, CNN, Hulu, and now Netflix have all joined in on the latest media craze surrounding the pop star’s battle to free herself from a conservatorship that was placed on her over a decade ago. Initially, in response to Spears’ increasingly deteriorating public persona and mental health (a sad saga which needs no reiteration), the conservatorship was a court-appointed order which was speculated by fans for years to have been unjustly implemented. Of course, we now know this to be true — four months after “Framing Britney Spears” was released on Hulu, Ms. Spears delivered emotional testimony during a hearing in which she explicitly and coherently sought the termination of her conservatorship. It has been overseen by her father, Jaime, since it was enacted in 2008, who has had control over the pop star’s estate, medical decisions, career, and even her personal life for the past 13 years.
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One day before a court hearing decided that Spears’ father would be suspended from his role as Britney’s conservator (though not yet terminated), Netflix released the newest #FreeBritney documentary, “Britney vs. Spears.” It details and recaps the tabloid exploits and personal struggles of the deeply troubled pop star, whose conservatorship having been propelled so intensely into the spotlight has been perceived by many as a net positive. And it’s true that the publicity has been largely a good thing. Not only has the world become privy to Spears’ mistreatment, but her father and his intentions for his daughter and her vast fortune have been forced under a microscope. It has put mounting pressure on the Spears family with regards to Britney’s objectively unfair situation, one which the entire world now bears witness to. The privacy of the conservatorship is no longer safe from the prying public eye — but, then again, Britney Spears herself has rarely ever been.
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However, hot off the heels of the Hulu doc follow-up to “Framing Britney Spears“ — “Controlling Britney Spears” – released just four days prior, “Britney vs. Spears” had much of its own fanfare already sapped upon release. It was conceived over two years ago and beaten to the punch by the New York Times. Still, it’s hard to come away from either of the dueling Spears docs without a sense of unease at the renewed media interest in picking away at the artist’s life, now under the guise of illumination and care. “Britney vs. Spears” was directed by documentarian and fan Erin Lee Carr (“How to Fix a Drug Scandal“) and researched alongside journalist Jenny Eliscu, the latter of whom had a positive longstanding professional rapport with Spears. The two women chronicle Spears’ saga in the public eye, often turning the film’s attention to themselves as they pour over articles and documents and new pieces of information. But most of the information they present in the film isn’t new. It only serves to either further scrutinize past ugliness that Spears has been adamant about moving away from, or provide a thorny redemption for characters from her former life that were originally vilified.
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From her rise as a renowned pop icon to her very public decline to the implementation of the conservatorship and her “comeback,” “Britney vs. Spears“ regurgitates most of the real-life beats we already know up to this point— and ones that were more efficiently recounted already. The breakup with K-Fed, the ugly custody battle, the 2007 meltdown and her return to America’s Sweetheart status with Circus, charting the conservatorship, and so forth. But this is all coupled with a reinvigorated sense of invasiveness. An unearthed text conversation between Spears and former paparazzo-turned-boyfriend Adnan Ghalib, where Spears laments her overbearing life situation; a voicemail in which Spears pleads with a lawyer for child custody; and a video that records a swarm of paparazzi as they crowd around an ambulance attempting to pull away with Spears inside after one particular breakdown. They’re all moments presented in the film where it seems we are being allowed to look in where we shouldn’t, or remembering things we ought to forget. This is made slimier by an unwillingness from Spears’ longtime friend and former assistant, Felicia Culotta, to answer multiple questions, after having been so forthcoming in “Framing Britney Spears” just earlier this year.
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There are a few instances of added insight, like the newfound spotlight on Spears’ former business manager Louise “Lou” Taylor, who is believed to have been an instrumental player in enacting the conservatorship (“I will not touch that one. Sorry, she would chew me up and spit me out,” Culotta responds, after being probed on Taylor). Or the retelling by Spears’ former friend, “Britney Spears: For the Record” cinematographer Andrew Gallery, of a day early on in Britney’s conservatorship, where the severity of her new life was made disturbingly clear by the lengths her team had to go to allow her to drive a car. Or Jenny Eliscu revealing she had once secretly met with Spears at a hotel bathroom so Spears could sign a petition spearheaded by Ghalib and Spears’ controversial former manager/friend Sam Lutfi, in order to get her attorney changed (and which, ultimately, led nowhere).
Otherwise, the film is not only repetitive but also profoundly uninspired documentary filmmaking. It hinges on the same paparazzi footage and breaking news bulletins it admonishes, a revolving door of black and white photographs, and snoozy, talking-head interviews with friends, colleagues, and legal consultants expressing sentiments we already know. This is interspersed with Carr and Eliscu “investigating” their documents for the camera and making superficial declarations on Spears’ situation, like comparing Spears being controlled by her father to the general nature of the patriarchy. It makes it all the more ironic that Spears’ own words on her situation are left unsaid until the very end of the film, as the kicker. These are in the previously unreleased recording of Spears speaking at her hearing back in June, when she had initially sought the termination of her conservatorship. It’s as if before Spears can speak for herself, her tabloid former life still has to speak for her first. In this way, the positives of her conservatorship coverage still come with the same baggage that the pop star has been carrying for the entirety of her fame. Who is Britney Spears if we’re not watching her? [C-]
“Britney vs Spears” is available now on Netflix.