The first warning about “Georgia Rule,” offered here to prevent an evening of mortifying embarrassment: This is not a movie to see with your mother. Not on Mother’s Day, not anytime.
Sure, it’s being marketed as a feel-good chick flick, some kind of ya-ya fried-green-tomatoey bonding experience, with the smiling faces of Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman beaming out of the poster. And the ad says it’s from the director of “The Princess Diaries,” and that was a nice movie to see with your mother. Right?
Forget it. “Georgia Rule” is an R-rated film with jokes aplenty about oral sex, childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism and other topics. It tries to treat these things seriously, too, in a queasy balancing act that usually falls flat on its face.
At the center of this is America’s trash sweetheart, Lindsay Lohan, as 17-year-old-going-on-40 Rachel. She’s being dumped in the small town of Hull, Idaho, to spend the summer with her grandmother Georgia (Fonda) as a way of getting her life back in line.
Georgia is strict and unloving, and I suppose Rachel’s mom Lilly (Huffman) figures if she screwed up Lilly’s life, she might as well screw up Rachel’s life too. Rachel gets a job as receptionist for a veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney) and seduces an innocent Mormon guy (Garrett Hedlund).
A claim Rachel makes about her past precipitates Lilly’s return and the sorting-out of the women’s lives. The script by Mark Andrus might have made sense at some point, but putting director Garry (“Pretty Woman”) Marshall on it undoubtedly changed everything.
Marshall mixes old-timey one-liners with the gravest kind of personal trauma, and it doesn’t work. The only convincing things are the small-town feel (actually filmed in California’s San Gabriel Valley) and Lindsay Lohan’s Lolita act. Marshall’s camera ogles her as she flounces through a series of peekaboo outfits.
Jane Fonda doesn’t have much to play, and she plays it vaguely. The talented Felicity Huffman is able to carve out a few original moments, but her character is mystifying. Lohan has always been a natural actress, and she has no problem carrying a film, but she looks dazed here, as though the effort of dodging tabloid bullets had worn her down. The more innocent days of “Herbie Fully Loaded,” in that long-distant era of 2005, are certainly over.
Lindsay Lohan (left) and Jane Fonda star in “Georgia Rules.”
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