Movie Review: Georgia Rule

An exploitation film for a more conservative audience. Georgia Rule is a film that seeks to use some frank sexual dialogue in the service of a moderatley exploitive tale of truth, love, and ultimately redemption. Unfortunately, the end result is somewhat halfbaked stab at giving us a family on the verge of self destruction. The way it played out reminded me of Black Snake Moan from earlier this year. In place of Samuel L. Jackson you get Jane Fonda, instead of Christina Ricci, Lindsay Lohan, and instead of the absentee convenience store mother we have Felicity Huffman. In place of the visual titillation, we get Lindsay Lohan, seemingly playing herself.

Georgia Rule depicts the fractured relationships that have developed between three generations of women in the same family. Each has suffered traumatic experiences, and each has dealt, or attempted to deal with them on their own. Their life paths have led them to a point where they can barely speak to each other without some sort of argument or confrontation breaking out. The problem lies in the fact that the characters changes happen rather suddenly at the end of the film, while all the way throughout we are faced with characters who are unwilling or unable to change. This is not normally a problem, but the lack of any out and out development in their characters threatens to sink the film before it can make its point.

We are introduced to Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) shortly after a blowup with her mother, Lilly (Felicity Huffman). Rachel is being the surly rebellious teen with Lilly as her fed up mother, Rachel is walking along the road yelling at her mother, mom is driving alongside trying to get her to get back in the car. This type of behavior continues for nearly two hours. Neither of them seems willing to make any concessions in an effort towards family peace. Enter Georgia (Jane Fonda), she is Lilly's mother and lives a very structured life, and anyone who lives under her roof is expected to yield to that structure and follow the Georgia Rules of the title. Of course, this leads to confrontations galore.

The drama builds around the unreconciled death of Georgia's husband, and Lilly's inability to get over that, her rebellion and inability to impose any type of discipline over her daughter, who was molested by her stepfather, and in turn has acted out in increasingly harmful ways. Of course, most of this is setup right from the get go, it may take awhile for the facts to come out, but the conflicts are in place from the start and last until we get the sudden resolution at the end.

Comedy weaves its way through the drama, but it doesn't really work. The tonal shifts are awkward and induce laughter at inappropriate moments. The comedy doesn't ring true to the story, while the drama never really takes flight as the characters are not all that likable and I cannot say I really cared about any of them.

Georgia Rule is not awful, but it is not successful in its attempts to show this family pulling itself back from the brink. The performances were fine, by and large, the faults lie mainly in the structure of the film and how the character arcs never develop, they are pretty much one note all the way through. It attempts to deal with the issues of loss, abuse, and the repercussions they can have on the family dynamic and the development of the individual. All of this it has in common with the far superior Black Snake Moan. Both feature a broken young girl in need of help and direction and someone who is there to try and help using some extremem methods, not to mention characters placed as roadblocks to the healing process.

Bottomline. It has its laughs, it has its serious moments, and it has moments of actually being good. Despite my criticisms, I did find myself enjoying it, to an extent. It reached, but its extreme moments did not go quite as far as they could have, but in the end I found enough worth to it for a middling rating, with a recommendation with reservations.

Mildly Recommended.