Generation hexed

When Georgia Randall (Jane Fonda), the titular matriarch of “Georgia Rule,” learns that her smooth-talking son-in-law has blatantly misrepresented himself, she beats him with a baseball bat. If that is the new penalty for deception, then the Universal Pictures marketing team that has portrayed “Georgia Rule” as a sassy, feel-good, female-bonding picture would do well to invest in some protective gear.

Don’t be misled by its upbeat trailer or the supposedly reassuring presence of director Garry Marshall. Weighted down by too much disturbing material to work as a glossy, lighthearted comedy, yet dappled with too many broad comic moments to stand as a serious film, “Georgia Rule” oscillates clumsily from shock to slapstick to schmaltz. The result of these big tonal swings is a cinematic strikeout.

Marshall (“Pretty Woman,” “Runaway Bride,” “The Princess Diaries”) has made a specialty of comedy-inflected female transformation movies. In his modern Cinderella formula, the awkward or morally questionable heroine finds romance and redemption and is ultimately transformed into a princess, either literally or figuratively.

On the surface, the setup for “Georgia Rule” seems to fit nicely into the Marshall paradigm. The maladjusted young Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) is shipped off to Idaho and the tutelage of her grandmother (Fonda) while her self-absorbed mom, Lilly (Felicity Huffman), and stepdad Arnold (Cary Elwes) enjoy a frisky sex life in San Francisco.

At the outset, the three women share nothing but their mutual dislike for one another.

Strutting around fictitious Hull, Idaho, in her skinny jeans, four-inch heels and belly shirt, Lohan’s Rachel is an exotic Lolita in a town populated by Mormon schoolgirls. She’s Julia Roberts in boots and hot pants on Rodeo Drive in “Pretty Woman”; no one can do funny fish-out-of-water bits better than Marshall. (It’s dream casting: Tabloid darling Lohan earned a harsh rebuke from Morgan Creek production company head James Robinson for unprofessional behavior during filming.)

Yet the film runs into trouble when its darker elements come into play. When Rachel mentions to kindly veterinarian Simon Ward (Dermot Mulroney) that she was raped by her stepfather, it goes over like a lead balloon. The fact that Rachel is a chronic liar does not help matters.

As her family members dig at the truth, Rachel changes her story.

With a script by Mark Andrus that repeatedly references themes like child abuse and alcoholism, it’s not long before Marshall is out of his depth. The director’s most successful films rely on a combination of star quality, humor and audience wish fulfillment, with darker material relegated to the background. It’s unlikely that “Pretty Woman” would have turned Roberts into America’s sweetheart, for example, if it had been made as it was first written, a gritty tale about a coke-using hooker.

Without the tools to handle such heavy material, Marshall falls back on broad comic strokes. When Lilly, a recovering alcoholic, returns to Idaho to confront Rachel about her allegations, she marinates herself in vodka. Her drinking binge leads to an ill-advised sequence in which Lilly finds herself half-naked on Georgia’s front lawn.

Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with using humor to lighten the mood, the sight of Huffman exposing herself to the neighbors feels like a cheap gag recycled from “Desperate Housewives.” Ditto Rachel’s attempt to seduce a naive young Mormon (Garrett Hedlund) and intimidate the local girls; if she was in fact molested, it seems wrong to use her promiscuity to generate laughs.

It’s a shame that “Georgia Rule” is so flat-footed, because Huffman, Fonda and Lohan are resourceful actresses, and they go to some lengths to wring credible emotion from their characters. It’s remarkable how Fonda’s brittle and intractable Georgia brings flashes of her father’s Norman Thayer from “On Golden Pond,” though one can’t help thinking that she deserves better comeback vehicles than this and “Monster-in-Law.”

“Georgia Rule” is not without its other redeeming features, notably a well-observed slice of small-town Americana (actually Chatsworth), which is another Marshall trademark, and a judiciously laid soundtrack that never feels obtrusive. With a different tone -- or in different hands -- its dark and light elements might have managed to coexist rather than vie so awkwardly for attention.

“Georgia Rule.” MPAA rating: R for sexual content and some language. Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes. In general release.