LINDSAY LOHAN: PORTRAIT OF THE PARTY GIRL AS A YOUNG ARTIST

By CARYN JAMES
The New York Times, 5/9/06

What if you took someone with Britney Spears's unfailingly wrong instincts about her image, tossed in a dollop of Meryl Streep's talent and gave her flowing red hair that morphed on a moment's notice to deepest black or fairest blond? You'd end up with a pretty good facsimile of Lindsay Lohan, whose tabloid-ready partying and shining on-screen talent seem headed for a collision, a crash bigger than the one last year that damaged the Mercedes she was driving (and that, she said, was caused by paparazzi).

At 19, she is at a turning point in her career. "Just My Luck," in which she plays a golden girl whose good fortune turns black, opens on Friday; it is the last of her teenage comedies. Soon she will be seen with Ms. Streep in Robert Altman's ensemble film "A Prairie Home Companion" (at right, with Garrison Keillor, set to open June 9), and her next projects also shout serious actress.

She has completed the independent films "Bobby," about Robert Kennedy's assassination, and "Chapter 27," about John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman. Then she moves off the assassination beat with three more films, pairing her with Aaron Eckhart, Jane Fonda and Adrien Brody.

Yet when she was host of "Saturday Night Live" last month, a skit tweaked her reputation for all-night drinking at the hottest clubs and feuding with other starlets, as she lectured the drunken Easter Bunny for his wild partying. Her image couldn't be ignored.

Lindsay Lohan crystallizes a question now haunting so many movie stars: how much does the off-screen image bleed into, and possibly hurt, the reception of the work? There are two conspicuously different models in front of her. The industry is buzzing about how the Tom Cruise wacko factor may have damaged "Mission: Impossible III." Meanwhile Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie — the Teflon Brangelina — are engaged in a disarmingly successful public relations strategy of take-us-seriously-and-by-the-way-save-Africa. Ms. Lohan may want to reconsider the way she has veered toward the dangerous, out-of-control side.

"Just My Luck" is being promoted as her first grown-up film, but it's nothing like that. Although she plays a young woman with a job, making her character an adult doesn't mean the film is for adults. In this romantic fairy tale that echoes "13 Going on 30," her character kisses a guy who has bad luck and exchanges her charmed life for his cursed one. She loses her job, and her hair dryer explodes (events given equal weight here), but the pop group that the bad-luck guy manages gets a recording contract. The bubble-gum boy band is a hint that the audience for "Just My Luck" is 12-year-old girls.

But "Prairie Home Companion," a film version of Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show, is a mature and shrewd career move. It puts her in the hands of a revered director and in the company of actors like Kevin Kline. Yet nothing in the film relies on her, except maybe the publicity. She and Ms. Streep pose together on the cover of the current issue of W magazine (Ms. Lohan is clearly the newsstand draw) and are featured in a mutually gushing interview.

Ms. Lohan's screen role as Ms. Streep's daughter, though, is not much of a stretch. Surrounded by eccentric characters, she plays the relatively normal one: a petulant young woman who writes songs about suicide.

The W article is less typical than a recent Vanity Fair cover story, which focused on the relentless rumors of bulimia and precocious hard living.
"The partying is overshadowing your talent; you don't need to be out every night getting in fights with the Tooth Fairy," she scolded the Easter Bunny in their role-reversal routine on "SNL." The routine wasn't very funny, not because it came so close to the truth but because, like so much of "SNL" lately, it just wasn't funny. A sketch about four people voraciously devouring a chocolate dessert did hit a nerve, if accidentally: it was obvious she was just pretending to eat.

She's usually a better actress than that. She was thoroughly natural even in her first movies: the Disney remakes "The Parent Trap," filmed when she was just 11, and "Freaky Friday." She has always known how to make comic lines land gracefully and has put her tremendous likability to use portraying high school misfits in the predictable but winning "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" and the witty, barbed, much better "Mean Girls."

Last year Ms. Lohan carried another Disney remake, "Herbie Fully Loaded," about a Volkswagen bug with a mind if its own, but by then her party-girl image was growing, and she was clearly over the hill for the cute-kid genre.

Of course, the story of child stars who go haywire is as old as Elizabeth Taylor. And Ms. Lohan's family history is dysfunctional even by show-business standards. Her father, Michael Lohan, is now a tabloid figure himself, piggybacked on his daughter's fame. He spent time in prison when she was young and is in prison now for attempted assault and drunken driving.

Ms. Lohan has released two CD's, and in that sideline recording career the greatest attention has gone to "Confessions of a Broken Heart," a song she wrote about her father. She sings: "Daughter to father! I am crying. A part of me's dying." And "Did you ever love me?" No wonder she has problems.

The swirling tabloid rumors are dangerous because she is no Paris Hilton, famous for being famous. Her situation is more like that of Colin Farrell, a fine actor who has worked with directors like Terrence Malick yet is still best known for drinking and womanizing. And while seriousness doesn't seem to hurt actors at the box office — being politically outspoken hasn't damaged George Clooney — out-of-control behavior can backfire, making the actor seem like some maniac you might stare at on a talk show, but wouldn't want to spend time with in a movie theater. Russell Crowe will probably think twice before tossing another telephone, even if that wasn't the reason "Cinderella Man" bombed.

There is probably a generational difference; Ms. Lohan's contemporaries may not care what she does off screen and may actually be envious. But being tabloid fodder isn't a template for a long career, and perhaps she is grasping that reality. She has certainly chosen her next projects well, including the high profile "Georgia Rule," a dark comedy directed by Garry Marshall, in which she plays a woman sent by her mother (Felicity Huffman) to stay with her grandmother (Ms. Fonda).

And it was recently reported — accurately it turns out — that she has been in talks to visit Africa, Hollywood's cause du jour, as part of the Bono-inspired "One Campaign." O.K., it's a move lifted straight from the Angelina playbook, and it won't happen anytime soon because she's booked up with work. But it's helpful news to have floating out there. Even if it never happens, at least she's moving up to a better class of rumor.