Content warning: discussion of pedophilia and molestation
At her wits' end, Lilly Wilcox (Felicity Huffman) drops off her seventeen-year-old daughter, Rachel (Lindsay Lohan), to live with her no-nonsense grandmother, Georgia (Jane Fonda), in Idaho for the summer. Georgia has a lot of rules, more than Rachel wants to deal with, and one of them is that Rachel needs to get a job. So Rachel starts working for the town doctor/vet, a recent widower named Simon (Dermot Mulroney). While pressuring Simon to just get over his dead wife and son, she admits that her step-father (Carey Elwes) has molested her since she was twelve. The movie takes a somewhat darker turn from here.
I think a lot of people wrote this off as a glorified Hallmark movie based on the marketing. It's easy to do. It's even easier now that Lohan and Huffman have become running jokes for privileged white women fucking up. But let's not forget that under the scandals and the money, these were talented actresses. Fonda, as always, is a goddamn legend, even though she doesn't really do a lot here. Elwes, in a rare villainous turn, makes the most of his limited screen time. Mulroney is pitch perfect and Garrett Hedlund is just adorable.
No lie, this is an extremely uncomfortable movie to watch, even though you see nothing of the abuse except the aftermath. A lot hinges on Lohan's believability, which is itself a commentary on victim blaming, but she is textbook perfect here.
Does everything in the movie work? No. The comic relief subplot about the town girls spying on Rachel and Harlan, the slut shaming, and the potshots at Mormons are lazy, low-hanging fruit and they could have been better. But it is not the saccharine mush that I thought it would be. Georgia Rule is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
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