This documentary focuses on an image of Shania Twain as an innovative, genre-bending, record-breaking artist, so it's surprising the film itself doesn't aim for that same originality. Instead, Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl relies on a predictable combination of archive footage and interviews, strung together with intertitles filling in biographical details and career highlights. Even so, Twain's landmark career and the childhood struggles that she overcame are a story worth telling. The theme here is Twain's status as a feminist who blazed a path for artists as wide-ranging as Avril Lavigne, Orville Peck, and Kelsea Ballerini.
The evidence is clear and unequivocal. An opening sequence with Twain in voiceover proclaiming she's always wanted to make her own decisions and not depend on anyone else fits with many of her best-known lyrics, and they introduce the trailblazing career the film goes on to detail. The documentary does drop some strings, like what happened to the siblings she took care of and her own son? And it completely ignores other parts of her life, like her second husband -- though her 2010 divorce from the first is given a lot of screen time.
Read the full review at Common Sense Media.
Image courtesy of Netflix.