Reel Politique: Lindsay Lohan update
As you know if you just read my review of I Know Who Killed Me, the new Lindsay Lohan movie, I’m a big fan of the actress, “troubled” as she may be. Not everyone else is. Entertainment Weekly has finally chimed in, knocking to lesser pages obits for Bergman and Antonioni in order to cover what the “industry” “thinks” about the future of her career. It’s another obit.
The older I get the less and less I want to know about the private lives of stars, or how a movie was made (EW’s cover story is a “making of” on The Bourne Ultimatum). Personally, I don’t care about their private lives because they are probably as shabby and unkempt as mine, and to know that is to be distracted from their performance. The problem with some of her recent films is that they expect that we know something about the real LL.
And if you look solely at the performances in her last few films you get a much different picture than the floozy paraded across the various loud tabloid shows or the garish gossip sites. Georgia Rule, in which she co-starred with Jane Fonda of all people, was blandly directed by Garry Marshall but does have an interesting narrative twist that has the viewers constantly changing their minds about Lohan’s character. She is not at all bad in it, and though it may be visually distinguished, it’s something of an underrated actrial effort. Chapter 27, one of the Mark David Chapman movies coming out that will probably go straight to video, is a somber entry in the “sympathy for the devil” genre where we are invited into the mind of a killer and try to understand them (I once met a psychiatrist who worked in the same state hospital where Chapman was held and he said that Chapman was a truly weird fellow). It’s basically a one man show with Jared Leto muttering to himself as an overweight Chapman. Lohan is only in three scenes, and she is charming, while having to follow an arc that takes her from curiosity about Chapman, whom she meets as a fellow Lennon fan outside the Dakota, to repulsion at his volatility (she’s not based on a real person). Curiously, Lohan appears much “smaller” and more delicate in this movie than in any other she’s made since The Parent Trap. And my views on I Know Who Killed Me are available elsewhere. Though she’s not necessarily bad in it, the film has a terrible script that no actress could get her voice around, and also it plays on the bad girl/good girl dichotomy that is the public Lohan.
If Lohan’s career is over (as Entertainment Weekly wants to crow), that is a real loss to the cinema, for reasons I state in my Voice review. But Lindsay Lohan’s career is less the tale of a star burning out and more a media feeding the ugly public appetite for the downfall of puzzled children.