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Movie review: ‘Georgia Rule’
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
When a movie has not one, but two, garden hose dousing scenes in it, you know filmmakers are scraping the bottom of their creative barrels.
Added to a scene where teen girls express their disdain (and, a good dose of jealousy) of a marauding trollop by throwing toilet paper rolls at her. These examples of slapstick desperation are attempts to lighten up a story that never coalesces into a dignified treatment of a pervasive social ill—sexual exploitation.
Director Garry Marshall lined up some powerful big and small screen personalities for his new dramedy, “Georgia Rule,” and put one out of her depth, one out of her league and one out of control as a mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter in various degrees of dysfunctional denial.
Lindsay Lohan, coping erratically with a “bad seed” imitation, portrays delinquent granddaughter Rachel. Daughter Lily is portrayed by Desperate Housewives delight, Felicity Huffman, with more or less a fixed glaze of alcoholic fury. Jane Fonda as Georgia, the tough old matriarch with a guilty chip on her shoulder staggers and lectures her way through her character’s sparse presence on screen.
Georgia Rule’s eerily reminiscent plot and Fonda’s irascible character evoke strong memories of On Golden Pond, a movie that did a much better job with the issue of child/parent estrangement.
Lily has run out of ideas and patience when it comes to dealing with her wild child. Although Lily believes her life took a wrong turn while living with her mother, Lily decides to park Rachel with Georgia for ten weeks in Hull, Idaho, a town with friendly people and conservative values.
After a prickly reunion with Georgia, Lily splits; leaving Rachel to a power struggle with Georgia and her rules about such things as meals, taking the Lord’s name in vain and getting a job.
In a sanitized version of girls-gone-wild, Rachel tosses her hair, bats her eyelashes and flounces her strapping body in a variety of suggestive outfits as she makes the acquaintance of the widowed town veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney) and a young Mormon (Garrett Hedlund) getting ready for two years of mission work.
Rachel comes on to them both; and while it’s obvious the director is going for the titillation factor, the interactions provoke a sense of embarrassed discomfort in the viewer who early in the story discovers that Rachel was abused by her stepfather (Cary Elwes) when she was a young teen. This results in making suspect what might otherwise be considered healthy (or, at least, common) expressions of young adult sexuality.
While it’s not unusual for a young woman to develop crushes on older men, and it’s becoming pretty common for young people wanting to be sexually active without “going all the way,” it is distasteful to realize that the director is going for laughs and shock value, rather than making an honest attempt to present a young woman struggling with her sexual identity.
The movie grinds its way to moments of epiphany for each woman in awkward, comic or overwrought scenes of confrontation, resolution and forgiveness. Except for Huffman’s convincing scenery chewing, one-note performances from Fonda and Lohan are pretty much the rule. Her return to film work after a long absence has been nothing but poor choices. Could horror films be in her future?
Georgia Rule is a Morgan Creek production, Universal Pictures release, rated R for sexual content, language.
