Growing up in the 2000s, the name Jennifer Lopez was on everyone’s mind…or at the very least, a close second with N*SYNC & Backstreet Boys. This was primarily due to her music career and her reputation as a diva perpetuated by tabloid magazines such as Us Weekly and television programs like Entertainment Tonight. So, when I received news that there was a documentary about JLo debuting at the 2022 Tribeca Festival, I was all aboard.

After Marry Me, I found myself super curious about filling in the blanks that the tabloids didn’t cover about her career. However, due to the editing of the documentary into a non-linear narrative following three separate points in Lopez’s life, Halftime fails to deliver on the promise of Amanda Micheli’s direction.

Watch the trailer below.

Micheli’s direction is absolutely impeccable. To construct the three distinct arcs in Halftime, Micheli takes archival footage from what I can only imagine is twenty to thirty years of Lopez’s career and blends it with newly recorded footage spanning from July 2019 to January 2022.

The narrative Micheli tries to weave with all of this footage is admirable & likely the most comprehensive look we’ll ever receive at Lopez’s career. Through Halftime, Micheli and Lopez are actively combating the vitriol spewed at her from publications & trying to reshape Lopez’s image into one where she wants to start being more of an activist for human rights. Does it work all the time? No. Is it either of their faults? No.

On a similar note, cinematographer Jason B. Bergh does an excellent job of shooting the new footage to get a feel for Lopez’s feelings in the Hustler slice of the film, as well as the section of the film that’s devoted to the Super Bowl LIV Halftime show, gathering some intense & raw emotion that is rarely seen in a documentary. We get real moments of anger, frustration, sadness & just about every emotion in between here, and it’s all shot beautifully. One camera trick that I appreciated that Bergh employs is a technique I can’t quite describe, but it looks like he’s using a narrow or spherical lens that gives those scenes a form of tunnel vision to them.

The editing job by Carol Martori is horrendous. While watching Halftime, I never fully understood what story Amanda Micheli was trying to tell. By the time I got my footing from the previous scene, Martori cuts to a completely different story, making the documentary essentially a non-linear documentary. One that requires the viewer to keep track of three distinct phases of Jennifer Lopez’s career: her beginnings, the Oscar race for Hustlers, and the road to the Super Bowl LIV Halftime show. I’ve seen non-linear documentaries work well. For example, the Kurt Vonnegut documentary, Unstuck in Time, tells a story of Kurt Vonnegut’s upbringing, how Robert B. Weide came to make a documentary about the famous author, and how that friendship affected his work over the 25 years it took to make the documentary. That documentary worked because every plot point related to that friendship. In Halftime, I don’t see the connective tissue between those three arcs of the story. I applaud the attempt, but it doesn’t work for this documentary.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive Jennifer Lopez documentary, look elsewhere. Not once in the entire runtime of one hour and 36 minutes did I have a grasp on what the documentary was trying to convey. Was it Jennifer Lopez’s rise to stardom, and how that put her on this trajectory to be one of two Latina women performing at the Super Bowl LIV Halftime Show? Was it her newfound love for activism? I couldn’t tell you. That said, director Amanda Micheli has high points where a concerted effort is being made to peel back the curtain on JLo’s life outside of being a star. Still, it’s not enough to save the film from Carol Martori’s editing of the documentary, which confuses the audience as to what emotions we’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. So if anyone from Netflix is reading this, I would advise re-editing the documentary and releasing that version to coincide with the release of another Netflix Original she’s the star of, The Mother.

★★★

You can stream Halftime on Netflix starting today.

Until next time!

Thanks to Thomas Stoneham-Judge from Movies For Reel, Shane Conto, Joseph Davis, David Walters, Ambula Bula, and Matthew Simpson for supporting Austin B Media on Patreon!