This sordid domestic comedy drama is not as bad as you are hearing, but the characters are bloody awful people. It has a certain bravery and piquancy we don’t often see today. There is a kind of truthiness, completely unleavened by goodwill, but it goes to creepy extremes.
Some people walked out of a promotional screening (yes – in Canada) when it became clear it wasn’t Lindsay Lohan of the Freaky Friday but Lindsay Lohan of Deep Throat.
Again, as ever, so much for trailers.
Despite Lohan’s joke status, she is an experienced and capable actress. Some people say she’s playing herself as a headstrong, foul mouthed rebel, who uses sex, drugs and alcohol to get ahead. But it is a role and she is talented enough to make it look easy, so people might not see it as an assumed character.
Jane Fonda’ first outing as a grandmother is brave – she’s arthritic and worn looking. I have to say, in her fishing hat, she’s a dead ringer for her father in their only project together, ‘On Golden Pond.’ She plays an instinctive and nurturing woman saddled with an awful daughter and dreadful teenaged granddaughter. How does this character spring forth monsters? We are never told.
Thankfully, Fonda’s spunky enough to tell her granddaughter to f… off.
Felicity Huffman’s raging alcoholic has little range – it is a limited performance of an angry, hostile, and hurt shell, and those moments we need to connect with are absent – until the last few minutes. Yikes.
Cary Elwes plays a truly monstrous man who may or may not have violated his twelve year old step daughter and paid her off, while believing they were actually in love. Why is he always stuck with the monster roles besides being good at them? Show me something new.
This is not meant to be a list of character (in the movie sense) assassinations, but it’s how it stacks up.
There’s not much to love with the exception of a corn-fed farm boy, a practicing Mormon who falls for Lohan’s Lolita, and brims over with naiveté. He means to be a good guy heading off to a two-year missionary stint, but she won’t have it. She has to conquer him through what for her is meaningless sex – ‘I didn’t kiss him!’ – and for him a revelation.
Also a loveable character is Dermot Mulroney’s vet-physician, the only strong male character Lohan has encountered. Naturally, she seeks to get to know him better by throwing herself at him – unsuccessfully.
‘Georgia Rule’ is jam packed with dysfunction - in the let’s put the fun back in dysfunction – sense, a real mash up of every family sin except murder, which incidentally is threatened. It’s a dizzying and repugnant hate fest.
On the other hand, it refuses to be saccharin.
Garry Marshall does an okay job of directing, but he hasn’t much to work with. The script just isn’t something I’d look at and go hey, let’s do this one.
P.S. – This is the film that Lohan disrupted by failing to show, prompting the producer to write her a scathing accusatory letter that found its way to the media.
Georgia Rule
Opens May 11, 2007. MPAA: rated R for sexual content and some language
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