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Before I went to see Georgia Rule, I read every single review for the film on Metacritic. Normally, I don't do this; but when I noticed it had a 25 average, I became morbidly fascinated with reading all the brutal assessments. Many of them were savagely funny: Kyle Smith's review for the New York Post carries the so-bad-it's-good headline "IT BLOHANS". But as I read one after the other of these uniformly negative pieces, I started to wonder: could it possibly be that bad? Sure, it stars Lindsey Lohan; but it's also got Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman, and while Garry Marshall's track record as a director is mixed at best, he is capable of making good movies. So I was prompted to see the film more by morbid curiosity than anything else.

Unfortunately, Georgia Rule is neither a good film nor an example of grotesque, camp wretchedness; it's mediocre rather than outright appalling, and frustrating because there are continually hints of a much different, better movie that could have emerged from this tonally confused effort.

The plot: recovering alcoholic Lilly (Felicity Huffman) is fed up with her teenage daughter Rachael (Lindsey Lohan), and has decided to place her in the care of her own mother, Georgia (Jane Fonda). Here's where the movie's problems begin: Fonda is still a superb actress, and she does as much as she can with an underwritten role, but Georgia is never more than an assemblage of off-the-shelf clichés. She's your stereotypical stern, uptight authority figure who sets strict rules (thus the title) for what can be said or done in her household; of course, she's never been able to tell her own daughter how much she loves her, and we know as soon as they have their first tense scene together that somehow, that will change by the end of the movie. Fonda looks mildly uncomfortable in most of her scenes, maybe because she realizes in her younger years she probably would've played Lohan's role and is bored out of her mind with the paper-thin character she's stuck with.

Lohan, given the showy part of a psychologically ******** girl who may or may not be lying about her stepfather's sexual abuse, is surprisingly unconvincing. She never inhabits her character; you're perpetually aware that she's playing a part, and she's not helped by the fact that the script doesn't really allow her character to grow and mature. We're obviously supposed to feel increasing sympathy for her as the movie goes on, but she never really learns anything from her experiences, no matter how the later scenes might strain to create that effect; and Lohan plays almost every scene with the same flat, affectless tone. She seems uninterested in the character and the material, and it makes it hard to put any emotional investment in the story.

That leaves Huffman to carry the acting ball, and she takes the only approach conceivable given the way Lilly is written: absolute, crazed excess. When she falls off the wagon big-time in the film's second half, she falls not just figuratively but literally, and Huffman throws herself into these scenes with an intensity that's entirely absent from everyone else in the film. Sure, it's overacting, but at least it's interesting.

As far as the male leads go, the less said the better. Dermot Mulroney fares best as a vet who gives Rachael a job as a receptionist, though his sad backstory (his wife and child died in a car wreck) is played for way too much sappy pathos. Cary Elwes, as the possibly ***** stepfather, has no spark whatsoever, and Lohan's love interest is portayed by Garrett Hedlund as a grinning, vaguely dim lunkhead. There's just no there there.

The film is not helped by Marshall's weird shifts in tone. The deadly serious sexual abuse storyline is interrupted by jarring attempts at broad comedy, like the scene in the vet's office involving a nervous pig; and sometimes the two actually happen at once, as when Lilly goes through her mother's knives to find one sharp enough to gut her husband. The movie never settles into a consistent approach; it just keeps veering back and forth between these two extremes, until the audience is left not so much confused as irritated and tired. If the film can't make up its mind if it should be taken seriously, then why should we bother?

Rating: 5/10