Of all the films Britney Spears could have “gone all Method” for, a “frothy” (but actually fundamentally deep) teen road movie called Crossroads probably wouldn’t have seemed worth it to most “serious” actors. Or even “serious” moviegoers. And Spears would likely tell you that her sudden “morphing” into Lucy Wagner on and off the set had nothing to do with acting, so much as “what acting did to [her] mind.” As Spears retells it in The Woman in Me, “I think I started Method acting—only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all.”
Spears’ unwitting (and unwilling) commitment to the “character” (not so far off from herself if the dancing to Madonna in her underwear scene is an indication), however, was not very appreciated by critics. Most of whom panned the project as shallow, insipid teen girl bullshit that served as a thinly-veiled puff piece for Spears. They even went so far as to deride her positive messaging about a girl finding her voice amid a world of oppressive patriarchal figures, with one female critic insisting, “…the film’s mealy-mouthed messages about feminine empowerment will almost certainly fall on deaf ears, since even eleven-year-olds know Spears’ power resides largely in her taut torso.” Indeed, Crossroads was lumped together with the badness of another film starring a pop star around the same time: Glitter. But at least Brit’s movie had the benefit of being released several months after 9/11, instead of just ten days later (with its soundtrack also being released on 9/11). And yes, both movies are, to this day, often shown as a campy double bill. But that’s not really fair to Crossroads. Because Spears’ performance does offer an emotional intelligence that Carey’s simply does not (despite her having “lived the tale” of a sob story childhood and subsequent breaking into the music business with the help of a possessive producer…in this case, Timothy Walker [Terrence Howard], before the plot becomes more A Star Is Born when another producer, Julian “Dice” Black [Max Beesley], enters the picture). And while, like Carey’s film project, there are similarities between Spears and the lead character (including an oppressive father steering the course of her life and keeping her from doing normal “teen girl things” or how Lucy spells “dryer” as “drier”), the difference is that one can see Spears isn’t relying on their similarities as her sole crutch for playing this part.
In fact, what she relied on for the role appears to be something far closer to the divine. Laugh as movie critics might at such an assessment. But when Spears writes, “This is embarrassing to say, but it’s like a cloud or something came over me and I just became this girl named Lucy,” there’s no arguing that something more mystical was involved. Even if that “mysticism” related to her mind’s power. Spears continued, “When the camera came on, I was her, and then I couldn’t tell the difference between when the camera was on and when it wasn’t. I know that seems stupid, but it’s the truth. I took it that seriously. I took it seriously to the point where Justin [Timberlake] said, ‘Why are you walking like that? Who are you?’” Yet another small anecdote that makes Justin come across like kind of an asshole for basically making fun of her uncontrollable commitment to the part in a movie that found room for her to show support for Justin’s goddamn boy band. All simply by placing “Bye Bye Bye” at the center of a light-heartedly contentious scene over what music her and her friends want to listen to while their driver/Lucy’s budding love interest, Ben Kimble (Anson Mount), keeps trying to change the station back to his “angsty rock” music (this, by the way, was the crux of warring musical identities in the late 90s and early 00s).
And though detractors would also argue that Spears does little to stretch her acting abilities in a role that finds her character auditioning for a record contract, the character biography Spears herself took pains to write in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary wouldn’t have been so thorough in spelling out the differences if she didn’t feel intrinsically separate from this person. Specifically, she states, “I play Lucy, an only child who lives with her dad, Pete, in a small town in Georgia. Lucy’s parents got divorced when she was much younger, and her mom lives out in Arizona. They don’t communicate. Lucy is the kind of girl who doesn’t make waves. She’s spent her whole life following the path her dad has laid out for her. She’s smart and gets good grades: she’s planning to be a doctor. But she really loves to sing and to write. She’s a poet and is kind of obsessive about her journal.” While it can be pointed out that, in many regards, Spears, too, was a girl who didn’t make waves, always listening to “the adults” and doing what she was told despite being the true agent of her success (Spears herself admits in The Woman in Me, “I was committed to not rocking the boat, and to not complaining even when something upset me”), Lucy is more overtly obedient and, yes, virginal. In fact, that’s the word one of her ex-friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana), hurls at her as an insult in the hallway of the school. In contrast to Spears, who played with that persona of being virginal via more sexually-tinged irony, Lucy is someone who wants her first time to be special, even though her high school lab partner, Henry (Justin Long), desperately wants her to keep her word that they’ll lose their virginity to one another so as not to go off to college all “naive.”
Lucy’s naïveté is also something that sets her apart from Spears, who, by age twenty in 2001 (the year the movie was being made and the Britney album was released), was already plenty worldly—and about to get even more so in the wake of Justin’s imminent portrayal of her as a “harlot” to his “golden boy” in the 2002 song (and video), “Cry Me A River.” The Diane Sawyer interview of 2003 would turn that worldliness into all-out jadedness. That all of this happened after Crossroads seemed cruelly poetic in that the film is about a teenage girl coming to terms with the terrifying responsibilities and potential landmines of womanhood. But what Spears endured was above and beyond the conventional horrors of becoming a woman. Lucy was lucky that, as a civilian (at least in the story we get to see before she potentially lands a record deal), she would never have to know what it was to be scrutinized not just over her body, but over every minute detail of her personal life. Besides, Lucy’s sartorial style isn’t exactly in keeping with Spears’, who also commented on that in Britney Spears’ Crossroads Diary by saying, “[My assistant,] Fe calls [Lucy’s clothes] ‘casual frumpy’—jeans, sneakers, cotton button-down shirt under a sweatshirt. Accessorized with a yellow canvas pocketbook and a bucket cap. They’re the opposite of what I usually wear.” To be sure, even when Spears’ was “off-duty,” she was always fond of low-rise, midriff-baring ensembles.
And then there was Lucy’s inherent knowledge of all things automotive thanks to her dad (Dan Aykroyd) being a mechanic. As Spears is sure to call out in her diary, “Me? Let’s just say that on a recent road escapade with Felicia, it took the two of us twenty minutes to figure out how to put gas in the car!” So yes, there are many nuanced differences between the two women, ones that ultimately overtook Spears’ own spirit for quite some time.
It was, apparently, CVS that cured her. Or rather, buying some makeup there with a friend. As Spears recalls, “After the movie wrapped, one of my girlfriends from a club in LA came to visit me. We went to CVS. I swear to God, I walked into the store, and as I talked to her while we shopped, I finally came back to myself. When I came outside again I was cured of the spell that movie had cast. It was so strange. My little spirit showed back up in my body. That trip to buy makeup with my friend was like waving some magic wand.” Undeniably, this is what would be called a symptom of psychosis. Schizophrenia even. And yes, Spears’ tendency to bisect her personality as a defense mechanism came into play early on here. With her portrayal of Lucy, Spears tapped into that precarious split between thinking, memory, personality and perception. As such, Spears put it best when she said, “All I can say is it’s a good thing Lucy was a sweet girl writing poems about how she was ‘not a girl, not yet a woman,’ and not a serial killer. I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads.”
This was something she seemed to notice and give voice to even at the time of filming, with one entry in her diary noting, “I’m doing another one of those really hard scenes. I’m crying and talking to Anson (Ben). It’s very emotional. I couldn’t pick my spirits up afterward.” The scene in question happens after Lucy’s mother (played by Kim Cattrall, though, at the time, there were rumors Madonna would do it—as if!) tells her that she never wanted her in the first place—that her father “made her” have a baby. Meanwhile she appears perfectly happy with her new set of children in Tucson. Spears describes getting into character for the emotionalism of that scene, explaining, “How did I do it? I remembered things that made me sad, but mostly I just put myself in Lucy’s place. I thought about how I’d feel if my mom didn’t love me, and I just hurt for her. Feeling the way Lucy would feel brought on the tears.” Tragically enough, it can presently be argued that maybe Lynne Spears really didn’t love Britney all that much to allow what happened to her with the conservatorship. Not just allow it, but help conspire to make it happen.
While Lynne made plenty of appearances on the set, it was, as usual, Spears’ assistant, Felicia, who was the most ever-present. It was she who prompted Spears to write, “She told me that she can see me getting more confident about acting. It’s true, I’m less worried about all this movie stuff—sometimes I even feel like an old pro!” That seemed to be true enough when, soon after Crossroads, she auditioned for the role of Allie in The Notebook. It came down to her and Rachel McAdams, with the latter obviously winning out. A result Spears was pleased with, commenting, “…I’m glad I didn’t do it. If I had, instead of working on my album In the Zone I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress night and day. “Although Spears was briefly hoping to make a “proper go” of becoming a singer/actress, in The Woman in Me, she concludes of that profession, “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
Funnily enough, Spears could just as easily be describing the bifurcation between her stage persona and her real self or, during her early Instagram days when the conservatorship was still not being questioned, her social media self and her real self. Thus, the great search for “the real Britney” has been a decades-long one.
As for Crossroads and what she sacrificed emotionally for it, it obviously still means something to Spears. Not only because she goes into such detail about it in her memoir, but because it was the only attempt at promoting the book Spears offered up: rereleasing Crossroads in theaters (in addition to a special edition of the soundtrack…with NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” still noticeably missing). Once again, however, it went unappreciated. Audiences just can’t seem to appropriately embrace or honor Spears’ uncontrollable Method acting abilities.
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