It’s worth paying attention to whatever movie Lindsay Lohan is in. Her personal problems, even in their facile abstraction to tabloid fodder, have been terribly sad to contemplate; they would be so were she talentless and unheralded, but they’re all the sadder for their derailment of—and substitute for—her work onscreen. She’s twenty-six, and leaped to stardom at twelve; Elizabeth Taylor was a star, at twelve, in “National Velvet,” but was cinematically nubile at eighteen, at which age Lohan was still in fictional high school (“Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen,” “Mean Girls”). By twenty-six, Taylor was already a dark star of grand cinematic drama, and it does the aging-juvenile Lohan no favors to cast her, in “Liz and Dick,” as someone who had grown up so fast.
Of course, everyone grew up fast back then (except maybe Mickey Rooney). The teen-ager wasn’t yet a class apart; adulthood was a plateau to aspire to. In any case, Taylor herself was startlingly, preternaturally mature while still a child. The pathos of her acting comes from the sense that she had lived lifetimes of emotion in small spans of time—had laughed and cried more in a day than most people do in a year and was piling the excess of new feelings on the exhausted smolder of extinguished conflagrations. With Lohan it’s the opposite: Who would want to have lurched from adolescence toward midlife in exile both from education and work, bearing all the burdens of stardom and reaping little of its formative experience? She’s now in the unenviable position of the classic cartoon character who dashes over the edge of the cliff and stays in midair, spinning her legs madly but not falling, and, of all things, the flimsy and inadequate platform called “Liz and Dick” rolls under her and, thankfully, gives her a place to stand.
In “Liz and Dick,” an actor who has been through several rings of hell—and may not, for all I know, have gotten back yet—portrays someone who went through something similar. Put another way, one of the most impulsively, spontaneously emotional actresses of our time portrays a similar performer. For all the differences in their circumstances, accomplishments, and worlds—Lohan’s performance (not her impersonation) is thrillingly immediate, not a composition of interpretive pieces but an incontrovertible, full-spectrum presence, even if the mirror itself is broken and some shards of character are still missing from view.
Lohan’s absence from movies has left a void where the promise of her teen work pointed. Other young actresses with other talents have come to the fore but none has her distinctive blend of voracity and innocence, of will and vulnerability; her performances haven’t been missing from movies we’ve seen, but, rather, movies meant for her haven’t been made. I’m impatient to see “The Canyons,” in which she will have the vast benefit of Paul Schrader’s direction—and in which the director has the great chance to work, with Lohan, a big-screen reconfiguration on the exemplary paradigm of what Quentin Tarantino achieved with John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction.” Though, in calendar years of a career, it’s closer to what Brian De Palma achieved with Travolta in “Blow Out,” and it’s that very time shift—the sense of getting out ahead of her age—that’s the abstract image of Lohan’s great actorly affect.
Photograph by Richard McLaren/Lifetime.
