Lohan's Rachel is a bratty, selfish, disrespectful California teen whose mom ships her off to Idaho for a summer with her estranged mother. But is Rachel such a horror because she was molested by her stepfather? At first we think so, then we don't then we do again, then we don't...and then we almost don't care because we hate her so much. She seduced this sweet Morman kid, tries to seduce her boss (a local veteranarian) and goes around acting like some kind of Lolita. But she's really sad inside so we're not supposed to hate her.
Huffman is nowhere near as good as she was in her Oscar-nominated performance for "Transamerica" but she has some good lines as the lush of a mother torn between her daughter and her husband and over who to believe. In one scene, she goes on a real bender and when Georgia goes to check on her, she sees that her daughter has cut off her long blonde hair. She asks her why.
"If was getting in the way of my drinking," Lily says, sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by liquor bottles.
We all laughed out loud.
It's hard to assess Lohan's performance. She clearly has the best role of anyone in the film but how do you know where the character stops and Lohan begins? Rachel is a vixen without any shame. In real life, we see Lohan's picture at every party or opening, we see her with this boyfriend or that boyfriend, we see her maybe doing drugs in a bathroom if Internet photos are to be believed, and we see her check into rehab.
So as we walked out of the theater, Eddie wondered how maybe Natalie Portman would have been in the role because she doesn't bring that off-screen baggage to a movie. I think Lohan needs to really think about what her off-screen antics are doing to her acting career because she has shown talent in other films and of all the annoying over-exposed celebutants, she is the one who has a chance of having a long career.
I hope she doesn't blow it.