Brooke Shields and I the same age. Which is to say, much like the kid in my grade who lived around the corner from me when I was growing up but I was never friends with, she was always there, part of the warp and weave of my life, but also (like any celebrity to a commoner) utterly unknown to me in any real way.
There is no equivalent to Brooke Shields in my kids' generation. She was a child star, but not a Disney or Nickelodeon star. In her first big movie, Pretty Baby, she played a child prostitute and as a 12 year old girl did her own fully nude scenes. This was a serious movie, directed by serious director Louis Malle and starring Susan Sarandon. For some reason the adults in Shields' life, including her mother, had no problem with the movie. For some reason I was able to watch an unedited version on mainstream TV.
Shields never took a detour into screechy, muggy roles. The closest she came was a fairly silly movie she made with George Burns, whose plot I don't recall. And then there was The Blue Lagoon, which sounds like a Disney kid movie but really wasn't. She played a teenage girl who had been shipwrecked on an island with a very cute teenage boy since they were children. Shields used a body double for the nude scenes in this role. My father hated this movie. "They never would have developed language skills like that!" "They never would have figured out sex on their own!"
Around that time there were the infamous Calvin Klein underwear ads. A semi-nude mid-teen Shields arched her back on a giant poster in Times Square, with the caption, "Nothing comes between me and my Calvins."
When Shields applied to Princeton there were rumors that her application was on the precondition that she would be accepted. I don't know if that's true. I do know that I happened to be visiting a friend at Princeton on the weekend that admissions letters went out, and that a movie society there aired a screening of Endless Love, a thriller that she starred in. My friend and I went, and gossiped about how many changes of outfits she brought when she visited campus. We didn't give much thought to what it would be like for Shields, the actual incoming freshman, to arrive at campus with the hope of just being a student.
Shields did attend Princeton, where she immediately bragged about getting straight As before any grades had come out, and wrote (or "wrote") a memoir proclaiming her virginity. Much like Emma Watson a generation later at Brown University, she complained to magazines that no one would speak to her because they didn't want her to think they were only talking to her because of who she was.
I have no idea what kind of student Shields the real person was. But I do know that as she continued on in life she became . . . awesome. It's possible that she always was, of course. As an adult she said that one of her biggest regrets was waiting too long to have sex. (Me too, sister.) She reinvented herself in sitcom land, starting with a guest spot on Friends and then in her own middling show, Suddenly Susan. She spoke publicly about suffering from post-partum depression, and blasted back at Tom Cruise, her Endless Love costar, for belittling her for it. Then she spoke publicly about caring for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
Which brings us to the new Netflix movie, A Castle for Christmas, which Shields starred in and has a producers credit for. In some ways it's a generic romance: American woman takes a trip to Scotland, makes friends with strong accents, falls for a duke, and throws a Christmas party.
But, like Shields, parts of the movie are awesome, including:
* Brooks' character, Sophie, is a bestselling romance novelist at least some of whose books have titles similar to Judith Krantz novels (another throwback to the generation Shields and I belong to). She is successful enough to have become filthy rich -- filthy rich enough to buy a castle. Yay for romance writers!
* To the extent that the movie has any conflict, it's over whether Sophie should be able to control what she writes. Can she kill off a popular character just because she wants to? Can she get away from the series that has made her rich and famous, against her publisher's wishes? It's the beginning of an interesting conversation.
* The Scottish village where Sophie finds herself seems to be entirely devoid of children. Except for Sophie, who has a daughter in college, none of the characters appear to have kids. They were not missed. I wonder if Shields used her power to keep children actors out of the movie -- and out of at least one opportunity to be exploited as child stars. If she did, more power to her.
* The movie is a love story about people in their fifties who never say, "We're so old, maybe too old to have sex, maybe sex at our age is gross, I look old, I feel old." It was just a regular love story, with characters who are my age. Yay! (Although the movie is 100 percent clean, with nothing more than a few chaste kisses on screen, I will nevertheless plug my new book of erotic short stories about people my age having good sex, The Mature Woman's Guide to Desire.)
* The movie had me grinning all the way through. Some of it had to to with the plot, and the characters, and the scenery. A lot of it had to do with fun radiating off of Shields. She seemed to be really enjoying herself, and that made me happy.
I do have a few nitpicks (of course, because I'm me):
* This is just personal preference, but when I entered the dating world after my divorce I had a few rules for who I would swipe right on on dating apps. No one who owns a boat -- that's a sign that they have too much free time and therefore would expect too much of my time. No one who smokes, because ugh, my marriage was ash, I'm not interested in dating someone who tastes like ash. And no one who never had kids (their own, step, foster, whatever, I don't care, as long as they helped raise them), because anyone who has not had to take children into account when choosing a job, choosing health insurance, deciding what to have for dinner for years on end, trying to figure out whether it's safe to buy tickets for an event more than three hours in the future, can't possibly understand what my life has been like. So I don't entirely like the romance between Sophie and the childless Duke.
* Spoiler on this one:
Sophie's daughter skips her dad's wedding to come to Sophie's Christmas party. This is the Duke's Christmas present to Sophie. It is not okay. The daughter should go to the dad's wedding. If the Duke had children of his own, he would understand that sometimes kids have to choose one parent's more important event over a party the other parent throws, even if they don't want to, and it's the job of the other parent -- and their lover -- to support them in that.
Nitpicks aside, this is is a lovely holiday movie starring a lovely person. More power to both of them.
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