'Georgia Rule'

Friday, May 11, 2007
With "Georgia Rule," Lindsay Lohan has made her "Gigli." That's partly because it's as epically awful as that notorious 2003 bomb starring the artists formerly known as Bennifer. Primarily, though, it's because Lohan's well-documented off-camera antics are such a distraction, as Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck's were, it's impossible to become engrossed in the film.

Although she shares the screen with acting heavyweights Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman, Lohan is the one who, for better and worse, grabs our attention. Strutting around a small Idaho town in oversized aviator sunglasses, stylish off-the-shoulder tops, skinny jeans and wedges, her party-girl character Rachel looks, sounds and acts like ..

. well, like Lindsay Lohan. Rachel is constantly getting into trouble and in need of rescue.

She's too skinny, she rarely eats. There have been some substance-abuse problems in the past, even though she's barely out of high school. And yet, despite the chaos that constantly surrounds her and her family, she always manages to look stunningly hip.

She even wears fake eyelashes at the breakfast table. Then, of course, many of us walk into "Georgia Rule" knowing that this is the movie that earned Lohan a public reprimand from James G. Robinson, the Morgan Creek Productions CEO who wrote a letter scolding her for absences during shooting.

All that, however, wears off eventually. And then you are left, for a very long time, with a film that is chock-full of dysfunctional family cliches -- a hodgepodge of histrionics that's just painfully shrill to endure. The massively contrived script comes from Mark Andrus (an Oscar nominee for "As Good As It Gets," who also wrote the treacly "Life As a House" and "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"), which Garry Marshall directs with a surprising lack of tonal focus for such a veteran.

"Georgia Rule" veers awkwardly between high physical comedy and dark family drama, and both extremes are cringe-inducing. Too often it plays like a sitcom about three generations of eccentric women, complete with jaunty little musical interludes as segues between scenes -- except that its plot revolves around an allegation of sexual abuse. Good times.

Fonda, as the Georgia of the title, must make sense of all this madness as the movie's matriarch. She's rigid about yard work and dinnertime (6 p.m.

sharp). No taking the Lord's name in vain around her. She still looks great in a T-shirt and jeans, though -- still got those Jane Fonda Workout biceps.

Huffman, as her estranged daughter, Lilly, also looks great -- polished, actually, despite her on-and-off battle with alcoholism. At the film's start, Lilly is driving her hellcat daughter, Rachel, to grandma's house for the summer, hoping it will straighten her out before she goes to college -- if she goes to college. Rachel is clearly brilliant; she knows her Bach and her Ezra Pound.

But she also behaves incredibly stupidly by tormenting the locals, hitting on that nice, wholesome Mormon boy (Garrett Hedlund) and putting her foot in her mouth about the town's veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney), whose wife and son died in a car crash. Then all of a sudden, at the Fourth of July picnic, poof! She starts acting like a decent human being.

She's actually ...

nice. It's as if the reels got mixed up, and we're watching the end at the middle. Except we're not.

And we still have a good hour or so to go. "Georgia Rule" feels like an even greater failure because its aspirations were so high. It has such star power, it's trying so hard to be poignant and meaningful, to say something about the power of family and redemption.

But in the end, it's just another concoction of unbelievable characters doing unbelievable things, and telling us nothing we haven't heard before.