Georgia Rule stars three of the more interesting women working in Hollywood right now.
The story is about three generations in the same dysfunctional family, and it does not shy away from dark family secrets of every sort. You've got the makings of a strong movie here, so the fact that Georgia Rule doesn't work is a bit of a tribute to bad filmmaking.
Lindsay Lohan stars as Rachel, a rebellious young woman sent, as a very last resort, to spend time with her cranky grandmother in Idaho. Rachel drinks, swears, lies and generally behaves badly. Once she gets over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house, she even manages to seduce some deeply religious Mormon farmboy; this tasteless development is played for laughs.
Wince-o-rama.
Grandma Georgia (Jane Fonda) has strict household rules about God, hard work and sitting down to dinner on time, and she is not impressed with Rachel. She is not that impressed with Rachel's mother, either, her own daughter, Lilly (Felicity Huffman). Lilly is a big alcoholic. She hates Georgia. She seems incapable of coping with Rachel. She gets drunk and falls down, which is played for laughs (see above). She has a rich husband and she lives in California, so mostly she is overdressed for Idaho.
While the women are busy hating each other, Dermot Mulroney turns up as the understanding local vet and father figure, and Cary Elwes appears as the creepy stepfather. The only thing worth watching in Georgia Rule is how easily Jane Fonda takes every scene she's in, smooths it out, straightens the corners, wraps it up with a big bow and just walks away with it. Steals it outright. The fact that Fonda manages to rise above a screenplay that's DOA is impressive.
(Georgia Rule is one of those movies in which a woman experiences some kind of personal enlightenment and immediately cuts her own hair. Do you know one woman who has ever done that in real life? Nobody does, and yet the gesture is a staple of crap movies. Interesting. Only not really.)
Georgia Rule veers back and forth awkwardly between humour and drama, getting both wrong. The various family secrets and plot twisties in the tale are painfully, psych 101 obvious.
And lest we forget, this is the movie that won Lohan a public spanking -- that sharp letter from Morgan Creek chief James G. Robinson about unprofessional behaviour. Still, unless she directed herself, Lohan can't carry all the blame.
While we're handing out letters on unprofessional behaviour, whose idea was it to feature Lohan's bouncy bosom so prominently in every scene?
Given the subject matter, that detail is really, really creepy, but you'd have to see the movie to understand why. That's not something we'd recommend.
(This film is rated PG)
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