While there are, to be sure, plenty of “films” in the Lindsay Lohan oeuvre that have been underlooked in the era called post-Mean Girls (Just My Luck, I Know Who Killed Me, Liz & Dick and The Canyons come to mind), one of the least seen as a result of how fucking difficult it is to track down without actually buying it on DVD–DVD–is Garry Marshall’s Georgia Rule. Co-starring Felicity Huffman and Jane Fonda, one might never have expected Lohan, at that juncture in what still vaguely remained of her career, to appear in a narrative about generational trauma resulting in alcohol and sexual abuse. But then again, this effectively sounds like a Lohan biopic.
Her mother, Dina, a former “dancer” and self-proclaimed Rockette (we can see where Lindsay gets her pathological liar gene), had a similarly destructive marriage as the one conveyed by Rachel’s (Lohan) mom, Lily (Huffman), with her stepdad, Arnold (Cary Elwes, tragically looking nothing like he did in The Princess Bride or The Crush). Lohan’s own daddy issues with former stockbroker/perpetual shyster, Michael Lohan, have manifested numerous times in her “artistic” output, most notably on the overly uncomfortable to listen to or watch “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father).” Rachel, exhibiting a somewhat more extreme case of trauma (though who’s not to speculate that Michael didn’t do some weird sexual shit to LiLo in the same vein as Dina?), has kept the secret of her stepfather’s abuse for five years (it began when she was twelve and ended when she was fourteen, after a male friend had to threaten to kill Arnold in order to get him to stop). But it all bubbles to the surface upon being exiled from her San Francisco home.
With a script by Mark Andrus, well-known for a particular brand of schlock (e.g. Life As a House and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), the narrative is surprisingly “edgy” considering its direction by Garry Marshall (who never managed to get any “grittier” than Pretty Woman–and who unfortunately had to conclude his career with Mother’s Day). Starting with the opening scene in which a moody and stubborn Rachel is already out of her mother’s Mercedes to make a statement by walking into the small Idahoan town of Hull, Lily tries to reason with her by noting, “This was your choice,” to which Rachel counters, “This was not my choice, Mom. What, to live with some old bitch that you can’t even stand that I don’t even know? You wanted me out of your life, I’m out of your life, Mom.”
So it is established that Rachel’s long-standing feelings of abandonment are a result of her inability to get her mother’s attention–to get her to truly listen to what she wants and needs. Yes, it sounds very similar to Lohan’s own upbringing indeed, shuffled from audition to audition with Dina’s insistence that it was what her daughter wanted, not what the stage mother within needed.
Unsure what to do with Rachel’s unruly behavior anymore (drug and alcohol-related car crashes being the meta norm at a time when it was for Lohan as well), she sends her to the best boot camp she can think of: Georgia Randall (Jane Fonda) a.k.a. her own mother. While there was a time when Fonda herself would have put Lohan to shame with “wild child” behavior, casting apparently saw fit to put her in the role of disciplinarian for an added sense of “wink wink” irony.
With Lohan was forced into rehab three times in 2007 (the same year Georgia Rule came out) alone, Rachel’s sentence to live with her grandmother in a picturesque setting with few distractions other than requisite “hot Mormon boy” (there’s a lot of those in Idaho–Mormons, not hot boys) Harlan Wilson (Garrett Hedlund) seems equally if not slightly less imprisoning. There’s also fellow eye candy Simon Ward (Dermot Mulroney), the local veterinarian immune to Rachel’s charms, which she’s so used to wielding with Lolita-esque efficacy (though, as we all know, Humbert Humbert would not be titillated by someone so aged as a seventeen-year-old). This, naturally, makes Simon even more appealing to her as a Daddy figure to attach sexually to (for that’s what she’s been conditioned to classify as familial love thanks to her fucked up upbringing, which Georgia explains to others simply as: “She was raised in California.”).
It is possibly because he’s so good at ignoring her overt flirtations that she has to get to him another way: via trauma bonding. Knowing that his wife and son were killed in a car accident, she ridicules him for acting the martyr, offering the information, “Do you know I was twelve years old when my stepfather first started having sex with me? I loved him. He was nice to me. We can all survive, Simon. You just don’t have to be so damn sad doing it.” And with that she drops the mic and walks away.
And then, of course, she has the gall to act shocked when Simon informs Georgia of this revelation, reneging on her statement with almost as much quickness as Lindsay did when the paparazzi caught her saying, “Paris is a cunt,” followed by, “Paris is my friend.” It’s all very schizophrenic in terms of which lies to best keep track of.
Lily, for one, isn’t so quick to buy it, though the news from Georgia comes at the uncomfortable moment during which Lily has just finished getting railed by Arnold. Still, as any mother at least somewhat cognizant would, she takes the information to heart and travels back to Hull to pry the “truth” out of Rachel. But, just as is the case with Lohan, that task is hard to do after years spent engaging in the necessary revelry of self-delusion. How else is one to preserve any modicum of sanity in such undesirable home life conditions?
As Lily’s own raging substance abuse problems are triggered from being back in her mother’s house and having to grapple with the reality that her marriage has been a sham, Lily lashes out at her mother by telling her that there was a time when she wished Georgia was dead. Hearing the tail end of this as Georgia walks out of the room, Rachel demands, “Why do you need to hurt her?” Lily snaps, “Because you slept with my husband!” So no, obviously, she can’t take her anger out on Rachel in her victimized state. And yeah, it’s a very ancient Greek scene (foreshadowing for Lohan’s eventual move to Greece?).
With Rachel going back and forth between what’s fact and what’s fiction, Lily serves only to prove Rachel’s point that she’s never really “been there” for her, therefore never really loved her. There’s likely no denying Lindsay has felt the same way on more than a few occasions (like being physically abused by her boyfriend on the same Mykonos beach that would end up becoming Lohan Beach Club). Even so, she still seems almost overly protective of the very person that turned her into, well, something of a basket case (Dina, not Michael). So yes, it’s only logical that Rachel Wilcox would be Lindsay Lohan’s most…Golden Globe-worthy performance. Because there’s always something to be said for method acting.
