Liz & Dick

I don't want to use this forum to beat up on Lindsay Lohan because she is an easy target, but really y'all? Did somebody actually look at the dailies while this film was being made and say to themselves, "oh yeah, Lindsay nailed it"...Lindsay Lohan was good in the Parent Trap when she was a small child, but it's almost as if she stopped trying after that. This film required acting chops that Ms. Lohan either does not possess, or could not tap into. Either that, or Ms. Lohan simply didn't find the role important enough to bother preparing for it. Even somebody who isn't familiar with the porcelain skinned, exquisitely beautiful Elizabeth Taylor with her precise, breathy, slightly British way of talking, and her expressive eyes could watch her films and at least TRY to embody her smoldering sensuality and physicality. Instead, I found myself looking at Ms. Lohan and thinking, her lips are too puffy, her skin is too rough, too thick, and the makeup just made it worse. The close ups were hideous, showing the thick makeup to cover Lohan's freckles, and her eyelashes are too obviously fake, with wigs that aren't even pretending not to be wigs. But that's all just costume and make up, so I still have hope. Then Lohan speaks, and that's when I know: It was just cruel to cast Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor and expect her to pull it off because she has this hoarse voice that sounds like it has spent too much time in smoke-filled bars, or screaming at people; a voice with a flat affect, rushing her lines as if she just wants to wrap the scene so she can go to the mall. Lohan's voice has NO inflection, and her face shows no expression. In fact, Lohan is NOT the exceptionally delicate, quietly fierce, risk taker that Elizabeth Taylor was; nor is she captivating on the screen like Elizabeth Taylor was. I'm sorry to make this statement, but it is what it is: Lindsay Lohan can not act. She can not play anyone other than herself. And she looks terrible. Grant Bowler did a great job of embodying the late Richard Burton, but his wig was terrible and distracted from his performance. Burton never had that much hair. And who did Bowler's make up? because they should have been fired. Richard Burton's screen presence had nothing to do with being handsome, because he wasn't. He was magnetic, and his voice was his best feature, but Grant Bowler is far too handsome to play Richard Burton, and his voice didn't have the richness or the depth of Burton's. There are so many talented actors in Hollywood who could have made this film worth watching, and had somebody gone to the effort to cast a better actress to play Taylor, I feel like Grant Bowler's Burton would have been more believable. Additionally, this film was simply a series of costume changing scenes filled with the couples' childish bickering. I realize the real life couple had a stormy relationship, but this film made them appear ridiculous. To make matters worse, there was ZERO CHEMISTRY between Lohan and Bowler, and I had the feeling Bowler was disgusted with having to carry this film by himself. This film lacks the effort necessary to make a film credible or even entertaining. Lohan should have never been cast as Taylor, and should have been replaced the first day of shooting. Not a kind tribute to Taylor and Burton. I think Burton would call this film bloody awful.

but I really can't When I saw the trailers, I thought it had promise. I saw scenes where it actually looked like Liz and Dick, but those were about the only resemblances I saw. The script was pretty thin and the acting was pretty pitiful. The script did cover their turbulent lives, but did not provide us with any information that we did not already know. Of course, if you are a bit younger than I am, you may have missed their trials and tribulation. If fact, you may not even know who they were and probably do not care. This movie will in no way inspire you to look further into their lives.

For me, the high point of the whole thing was when Burton died because I knew that the movie was about to be over. Skip this one.

We watch a lot of Lifetime movies. My family swears by them. However, even by Lifetime movie standards, this movie is an absolute put-on production. I expected some level of awkwardness and wince inducing dialogue, but usually there was redeem-ability in the storyline or "charm factor". This movie had all the potential to be something great, but in the end it was too unbelievable and scarce in good qualities to be redeemable.

It can't be blamed on just one person's performance, but I would put a vast majority of the blame on Lindsay Lohan, the script and the production.

Grant Bowler showed a lot of potential and often it either seemed like he was either the only one actually acting in a scene (with Lohan) or he was trying to illicit some kind of emotional reaction in her performances that her responses to this was almost always met with a flat note. You could completely feel and see the disconnect between them and their own personal expectations. I felt like he put in his all and that he was trying his best to stay in character, but her personality was far more visible and opague than her acting on any level that the believability was just not there. I found myself feeling pity for him and the rest of the cast, but often the bad dialogue just amplified these problems ten-fold.

The sense of time/space was very vague too. Scenes would change often but you had no idea how time had progressed. There was no real feel of what time period you were in or the energy of the era you were living in. Many of the scenes looked the same or the vibe was always the same. You had to rely on the text that would appear that would tell you the shift in time, but I looked away at one point and found myself totally lost time-wise in the film. This made the film feel like it was crawling to finish and made it feel like they hadn't finished editing. Almost like they didn't get enough good scenes, they just decided to put in what made the most sense time-wise, but it was just snapshot moment after snapshot... it felt more like you were going through a change-of-set at a high school play than a cinematic transition like really any movie.

Looking back, had they cast someone more reliable than Lindsay Lohan in terms of acting and personality, they would've stood a better chance of finding someone whose chemistry would've matched Grant Bowler's acting. This film probably would not have struggled so much to make the dialogue work. However, her acting felt 'rushed' as there was no real energy there and she was sleep walking through the scenes.

On the plus side, my interest in Elizabeth Taylor grew so much after this film because I felt like it did her so little justice... Lindsay especially made Taylor seem more estranged to the viewer after her performances. For anyone who wants to know more about Elizabeth Taylor, they would do better to read a biography and watch a few of her movies than to watch this film... this film does her little justice.

As has been noted, Bowler evokes Burton with his voice. He has studied him, has it down. Lohan does not sound like Taylor at all, does not bring anything that remotely captures the essence of the woman to this film pairing. She just careens through her lines as if a superficial physical resemblance was all that mattered. And her inability to evoke Elizabeth is a constant irritant. There is nothing in this performance that gives a clue as to why they were attracted to one another...or if they really were. I kept listening for a resemblance in the voice, in the bearing..it just was not there. I found myself thinking at one point that Michael Jackson could have done a better job, as he sure had studied the woman. Painful.

Liz & Dick (2012)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Made-for-TV film about the up and down relationship between Elizabeth Taylor (Lindsay Lohan) and Richard Burton (Grant Bowler). That's pretty much all you need to know in regards to the story. If you don't know who Taylor and Burton were and just tune into this film then you're going to come away that they were both spoiled, drunk idiots who fought and had sex a lot. LIZ & DICK is a pretty poor movie that has some very good stuff in it but there's just no getting around some incredibly big and fatal flaws. The biggest flaw is the casting of Lohan, a talented actress, who is simply in way over her head. I really don't blame her horrible performance on her, I really blame the producers for casting her just to get some press and ratings. It's clear their trick worked but it really ended up killing the film because there's not a single frame where one will believe her as Taylor. The performance from Lohan is just bad and all over the place. Even embarrassing when it comes times for Lohan to re-enact some of the famous scenes from Taylor's movies. You can even call the performance lazy as the film covers twenty-plus years yet Lohan never ages. The film also goes over Taylor battles with gaining weight yet Lohan remains 100-pounds if that. Even worse is Lohan keeping her exact voice and not even trying to do Taylor's. Bowler, on the other hand, does a pretty good job capturing the voice of Burton and he handles the dramatic scenes much better. The film never tells you much about either person other than they drank too much and we never even get any knowledge of the films they made together. This is basically just a sleazy tabloid piece that goes for ratings and very little else. The film remains watchable because of the train wreck of a performance by Lohan but thankfully neither Taylor or Burton lived to see this.