Special to the Herald
Let me tell you about a movie I kind of wanted to see. It’s called Georgia Rule, and it’s about three generations of women trying to understand each other in a small town in Iowa.
Jane Fonda plays the hard-as-nails grandmother, Georgia. Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman is Lily, the lost, alcoholic mother. Lindsay Lohan stars as Rachel, the wild, uncontrollable teenage daughter. Lily and Rachel live in San Francisco, but they’re spending one summer with Georgia in Idaho, learning how to be a family again.
Through the course of the film, Lily will rekindle an old flame (with “My Best Friend’s Wedding” star Dermott Mulroney), Georgia will learn to soften for the people she loves, and Rachel will calm down and find love with a local boy.
And they’ll all live happily ever after, thanks to feel-good director Garry Marshall (“The Princess Diaries” and “Pretty Woman”).
What do you think? Maybe my “Georgia Rule” is something you’re interested in seeing, maybe it’s not, but here’s the problem: it doesn’t exist. That sweet family drama about three women learning to be a family, that movie with the excellent cast and funny, thoughtful premise?
It’s not real. No, the real “Georgia Rule” is actually about child molestation.
That probably surprises you — it certainly came as a surprise to me when I saw the movie last weekend. I expected to see the movie I just described, only to discover that “Georgia Rule” is quite a different film.
The three main characters are pretty much as I expected, and wild Rachel IS sent to live with Georgia for the summer because Lily doesn’t know what to do with her. But the entire film is really about whether or not Rachel is lying when she says that she was sexually molested by her stepfather.
In fact, the movie should have been called “Did He, or Didn’t He?” as we’re bounced back and forth from believing Rachel’s lying to thinking that she isn’t.
In the heat of an argument, Rachel tells her boss — and her mother’s ex-boyfriend — Simon (Mulroney) that she was sexually molested from ages 12 to 14.
Is she lying for attention? Or did her mom’s husband really abuse her into becoming the angry, predatory temptress we’re seeing now? The stepfather (Cary Elwes, in yet another slimeball roll) in question shows up to deny everything and proclaim his pure and age-appropriate love for both Lily and Rachel, and Lily — and the moviegoer — just doesn’t know who to believe.
“Georgia Rule” is the kind of movie that makes me angry — because it could have been really good. If the filmmakers had focused on either of the two main storylines, and tied up the loose ends and mystifying plot turns, this could have been a really interesting summer drama, the kind of movie that tells a great story and gives you something to talk about for a few days.
Instead, it’s a mess of a film, confused and scrabbling, and ultimately drowned by the weight of its own ambition.
But that’s not my point. The trailer for “Georgia Rule” has been playing for months, with a sweet, bouncy chick-flick song and a voiceover saying — I checked — “From Universal Pictures and the director of The Princess Diaries and Pretty Woman, comes a story about what tears us apart, what brings us back together, and the connection that makes us family.”
That’s awfully generic, especially considering that the clips in the preview are all about the Lily-Georgia-Rachel storyline, with plenty of mother-daughter square-offs and a few glimpses of Lily’s and Rachel’s respective love interests.
There have been TV spots, internet ads, and movie posters, all with this feel-good family dramedy campaign.
And yet, they’re all advertising a movie that doesn’t exist. Here’s the moral dilemma: If you’re the guy in charge of creating the preview for a new movie, should you be honest about what you’re representing, or is your only responsibility to get butts in the seats?
The people who made “Georgia Rule” would certainly argue for the latter. And they’re not the first — just this year, “Bridge to Terabithia” pretended to be nothing more than a children’s fantasy movie, but those of us who were emotionally haunted by the book as children know better.
And the little-seen, little remembered horror movie “Primeval” was built up as the story of the world’s greatest serial killer… but they fail to mention anywhere in the trailer that he’s a crocodile. (I checked.)
What’s next? Marketing “Nancy Drew” as a cold espionage thriller? Maybe trying to sell us “Pirates of the Caribbean III” as a intimate indie drama? Genres exist for a reason —n they help us figure out what the movie is all about, to see if we’re interested in seeing it. It really is that simple.
Misrepresenting a movie’s genre is not only dishonest, it also robs the people who might actually have been interested in Lindsay Lohan doing a serious, difficult dramatic storyline, or hey, checking out the adventures of an enormous killer crocodile.
Happily, the misleading trailer hasn’t really done much for “Georgia Rule.” Despite their best efforts to lie about the controversial subject matter, the movie only made a teeny $6.7 million in its crucial opening weekend, and that number has already dropped down to $3.7 million last weekend.
I’m not blaming those numbers entirely on the deceitful ad campaign, but it probably played a role: word-of-mouth reviews are still fairly powerful in American cinema today. With the recent availability of online trailers and literally millions of Web-based movie reviews, maybe trailer editors should realize that honesty is still the best policy.
Melissa Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in film and television, and works for a television production company in Madison. E-mail comments and questions to Melissa at mfo.usc@gmail.com.
