Ryan ChartrandWhat do you do with your uncontrollable teenage daughter?
Send her to Idaho!
In “Georgia Rule,” living amid Mormons is supposedly a remedy for being an ex-drug-using, slutty compulsive liar.
Frustrated mom Lilly (Felicity Huffman) drops off her daughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) to stay with the supposedly hard-ass grandma Georgia (Jane Fonda), who is actually a big softie. Rachel attempts to seduce everything that moves, including Mormons and a very forlorn-looking Dermot Mulroney with embarrassingly bad hair (who, by the way, used to date her mom).
Then there’s the charming plotline of Lilly’s new husband maybe, maybe not, sexually assaulting Rachel from age 12 to 14 and buying her silence with fancy cars.
So, basically, take any thoughts of “fun,” “feel-good” or “summer flick” you may have acquired from the preview and throw them out the window. It’s painfully awkward at moments. Not funny awkward like Fonda rendering Stephen Colbert speechless, but shifting-in-your-seat-and-hoping-no-one-saw-you-go-into-the-theater awkward.
Granted, it’s a Lindsay Lohan movie, but I thought the other actresses could save it. Wrong. This movie is messed up, primarily because there can be no affection for the characters.
The male characters aren’t even worth mentioning, as they must only be there as reminders that longer hair does not look good on everyone.
Huffman shows none of the spunkiness she displays on “Desperate Housewives” as Lynette. She plays an indecisive alcoholic who, how original, doesn’t get along with her mom, and doesn’t know whether to believe her lawyer husband or troublesome daughter. We can’t really blame her for that though, they’re both liars.
Georgia spends most of her time gardening with the young boy neighbors and spouting “rules” at random moments. To her credit, she has one kick-ass scene where she chases the stepdad with a baseball bat and threatens his Ferrari. At least she takes sexual assault seriously.
If anyone had good feelings left about Lindsay Lohan as a person (“Parent Trap” lovers in denial, perhaps), this movie will crush them. This character is what tabloids make Lohan out to be in real life: a short-skirted, look-at-me sort of person who has an intimate relationship with drugs, alcohol and people she just met. The audience is left with no doubt that her character has enough notches on her bedpost to worry about it suddenly collapsing.
Rachel makes one friend, a long-haired Mormon guy, whom she promptly gives a blow job to in a rowboat, since it’s so wrong that he has never had sex. The two of them road trip up to BYU, tell his girlfriend, and get spied on by the girlfriend’s many friends as punishment. Rachel threatens them with the only weapon in her arsenal: “If you ever call me a name, ever again, I will find all your boyfriends and f-k them stupid.”
She would, too.
Ironically, the character wears white outfits for most of the movie. Seriously, it’s white dresses, white shirts, white pajamas – who only owns white clothing? I don’t know if it was meant to be symbolic, a diamond in the rough sort of thing, but it was weird.
The movie attempts to make fun of Mormons on a regular basis, but fails at that as well. The truth is, everyone watching the movie may feel the urge to convert, because the “normal” Californians are pretty screwed up.
In the end, mother and daughter reunite in a teary hug on the side of the freeway, bringing the movie full circle.
You can’t help but dab a tear or two, watch the credits roll and think, wow – that’s two hours and $7.50 that I’ll never have back.