Georgia Rule: DVD & Movie Review (2007) by Christopher Smith

The new Garry Marshall movie, "Georgia Rule," stars everyone's favorite bonne vivante l'enfant terrible Lindsay Lohan as Rachel, a misguided train wreck of a 17-year-old brat who sports the sort of foul mouth that crosses the line so often, some might want to wash it out with soap.

In fact, in a pivotal scene, that actually happens, with Jane Fonda's Georgia literally applying the soap and the scrubbing.

Not that it does much good, mind you. You could dip this film and its characters in bleach and still you’d come away with a story that makes you itch.

Based on Mark Andrus' screenplay, "Georgia Rule" is uneven and unrelenting. It begins on a shrill note and it sustains it, with Rachel and her alcoholic mother, Lilly (Felicity Huffman), having at each other's throats in the road trip from hell.

Determined to straighten her daughter out, selfish, unlikable Lilly has yanked selfish, unlikable Rachel out of San Francisco and shuffled her off to, well, Idaho, where Lilly's mother lives a cleaner life marked by the sort of strident rules that drove Lilly away years ago. With Rachel also railing against those rules, the stage is set for loads of soapy confrontations between granddaughter and grandmother, which makes for an exhausting movie that plunges into an almost limitless well of bad taste, a good deal of which is masked as humor.

Witness, for example, Rachel's behavior in town--she's a blast of cold air cloaked in hot steam. She dresses like a tart, behaves like a tart, and essentially is a tart, going so far as to treat the local Mormon boy, Harlan (Garret Hudlund), a virgin, to oral sex, while later chasing down the local Mormon girls and promising she'll sleep with their boyfriends if they don't get off her back.

To top things off, she puts the moves on her new employer, the smoldering local veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney), who happens to be her mother's former boyfriend.

So, yes, Rachel is a charmer, as is the movie, which obviously has issues with the Mormon faith that linger on the screen like a stain.

Meanwhile, the film tries to explain away Rachel’s bad behavior by tossing in a heated subplot that involves child molestation, which ignites in Georgia a rage so deep, she comes out swinging with a baseball bat in ways that suggest all those Jane Fonda workouts from the '80s weren't for nothing. This woman does some damage.

What's so disappointing about "Georgia Rule" isn't just that Universal sold out audiences with a misleading advertising campaign that suggested a far lighter movie--the sort you'd expect from Garry Marshall, whose “The Princess Diaries” and “Pretty Woman” hardly are heavy fare--but that everyone here is better than the material, which awkwardly puts a halo on everyone's head by the end of it. Fonda and Huffman have a go of it, sometimes rising to the occasion, but as for Lohan? She's a lost soul.

Grade: D+