★☆☆☆☆
One Star
Contrary to what the rest of this article may suggest, I am not a hater. I am very much Team Lohan.
I’ve been rooting for the comeback of the century after every prison stint, car crash, jewellery theft and failed drug test. She was not only responsible for one of the most quotable movies of our generation, Mean Girls, but also carved an art form out of the mugshot, and successfully managed to work even the most horrendous shade of jumpsuit-orange.
Lifetime Network’s straight-to-TV movie Liz & Dick, the story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was billed as a triumphant return, and for the briefest of moments looked as though it might fulfill its promise. What in fact emerged was perhaps one of the most spectacular and catastrophic train-wrecks to grace America’s screens in recent years, taking its rightful place alongside Showgirls and The Room in the so-forehead-smackingly-awful-you-can’t-afford-to-miss-it Hall of Fame.
Lifetime’s publicity around the film rests upon the following premise: Elizabeth Taylor was hounded by the paparazzi. Lindsay Lohan is hounded by the paparazzi. If you subject the latter to a ‘minor’ re-style and a load of airbrushing, then squint very hard whilst inebriated, she looks like Liz. Unfortunately for our Li-Lo, a shared history of alcohol abuse and pap-trouble does not a convincing performance make.
Cue Elindsabeth, a character who only sporadically slips into Queen’s English, largely sounding like an ageing drag queen with a penchant for Ke$ha-style dental hygiene. Liz & Dick’s protagonists recount their turbulent romance from the vantage point of a nondescript place, The Other Side, in which the compulsory dress code is Funereal-Glam and regular close-ups unintentionally ensure we pay more attention to the current state of Lindsay’s face (Fillers? Drug-induced bloat? Strange form of weight gain which exclusively affects lips, cheeks and chin?) than the dialogue itself.
A stable pace is clearly something that was abandoned (alongside accent coaching or a half-decent wig for Grant Bowler’s Burton): three-quarters of the film passes before divorce no.1 even occurs. After this Liz is accompanied by an unidentified new male for a handful of scenes (New lover? Wayward extra?), has a spell in hospital (Liz has colon cancer! Liz doesn’t have colon cancer!), re-marries Burton in Botswana, and then promptly divorces him again.
All of which brings us to Liz and Dick‘s pièce de résistance: 1980’s-era Elindsabeth. Whilst transforming a young actress into a fifty-something is difficult at the best of times, the only element missing from the Halloween costume thrown upon poor Lindsay is the accompanying laughter track – which, incidentally, might aid a rather sensible re-marketing of the whole piece as a comedy.
I personally am holding out for the porn adaptation; the acting will be better and no one even need come up with a dirty pun.
