I went into Georgia Rule expecting to hate it. Goodness knows the obnoxious trailers didn’t help, and just looking at Gary Marshall’s name on the credits as director was virtually enough to make me hurl. Making matters even worse, this is the infamous movie where star Lindsay Lohan got a memo from producer James G. Robinson questioning her work ethic. Talk about not getting off with a critic on the right foot.

Shows what I know. While there is plenty about Georgia Rule I wish would have been done differently, the bottom line is this movie proved to be a powerful couple of hours. This drama does not go in the direction I expected, the cloying sugary cuteness inherent in so many of the filmmaker’s other works from Overboard to Pretty Woman to The Princess Diaries thankfully dialed down to tolerable levels here.

But saccharine sweetness isn’t important. What is worth talking about is how strong this film is, how much I enjoyed and was moved by it. Mark Andrus’(The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) script is far better than I ever would have anticipated, his sense of character and dialogue reminiscent of his fantastic early work on As Good As It Gets and Late for Dinner. This is a sexual drama not for the squeamish or for the easily offended, but for those looking for adult entertainment and not the usual summer CGI whiz-bang this one fits the bill and then some.

Rachel Wilcox (Lohan) is a mess. Her mother Lilly (Felicity Huffman) is at the end of her rope, deciding to dump the California hothead into the lap of her own rigidly rule-oriented Idaho mom Georgia (Jane Fonda) for the length of the summer. Maybe doing so will teach the girl a few lessons. At the very least it will get her out of Lilly’s hair until the daughter is ready to head off to college in New York for the Fall.

But while things change, they don’t do so in the way any of these three generations of Wilcox women expect. Given rules and responsibility, Rachel responds by blasting out revelations concerning her stepfather to the small town’s veterinarian (and sometimes medical doctor) Simon (Dermot Mulroney). Soon all three females are forced to confront their pasts, their presents and where they go in the future, realizing that sometimes the hardest thing to do is to forgive, and that saying I love you might just be the best medicine of them all.

First things first, while watching this I couldn’t help but wonder what a woman behind the camera would have brought to it. I kept imagining someone like Allison Anders, Jane Campion, Susanne Bier, Catherine Hardwicke or Patricia Cardoso taking this material and making it soar, something it is a pity none of them got the opportunity to try. Also, while this is easily the darkest and most dramatic material Marshall has dealt with in quite some time (probably since The Flamingo Kid and Nothing in Common), he still can’t escape his sitcom roots. The tone varies wildly at times, frustratingly so at times, and more than once I wanted to smack the director across the face for ruining a powerful moment with forced hilarity.

Thankfully, this doesn’t kill the picture as much as you would think. Huffman is great, Fonda is wonderful (and looks amazing) and Lohan, blast it all if that little in-and-out-of-rehab underage dynamo isn’t borderline excellent. If anything, the girl’s checkered (to put it mildly) public persona only makes this portrait of teenage depravity that much stronger. The actress grows into the part beautifully, doing far more for the film than maybe it actually does in the end for her.

Sure she says the F-word and gives a guy a blow-job (a cliché lunkhead of a country bumpkin reasonably well played by Garrett Hedlund), but that’s not where she grows up. It is in the performance, the ability to mine the darkness in her own life, that shows the former Disney darling maturing magnificently, and if Lohan can keep it up I’m almost positive she’ll be a talent to watch for quite some time to come.

I’m probably going to be in the minority on this one. What you see with Georgia Rule is certainly not what you get. It is dark, frankly sexual and mines territories a lot of people get too uncomfortable sitting in the theater to ever want to see explored. But that’s their problem, not mine, and I liked this movie, sometimes even loved it, and according to Sara’s Rules that makes this drama worthy of a recommendation and applause, maybe even at the same time.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)