Lindsay Lohan should play injured bitches, not Netflix Christmas novel heroines.

Lindsay Lohan spent the first 30 minutes of her new Netflix romantic comedy Fall in love with Christmasbehaves like a perfectly legitimate boy.

Sierra Belmont, a hotel heiress whose name parodies that of Paris Hilton, is pampered and pampered like a beloved lap dog; her job, if any, must be done by a small team of frightened assistants who put caviar into her open mouth every morning. There is a subplot about how her father tries to make her “VP of Atmosphere” for his hotel group and she is in a relationship with an undercover gay powerful man who proposes to her for some reason.

Shortly after this marriage proposal, Sierra, impeccably dressed, falls down a mountain at her father’s ski resort, smashes her head in, and then – in the logic of a hundred and one other horrific, pointless love movies – wakes up with no memory. her. Names, no memory of his former status, and too little intelligence to resist the romantic advances of an extremely average person. Played with charming slowness by Glee’s Overstreet Chord, an extremely average guy teaches her how to cook and clean – but little by little, because it’s 2022. The film was a hit and was shown on Netflix for the first four days.

If you lived through the 1990s, reading the words “Lindsay Lohan” and “acting like a kid with full rights” in the same sentence might give you deja vu.

Beautiful, shy and boisterous, superficially suave but firmly rooted, obsessed with cracker comic moments yet finicky in the manner of a fringe person, Sierra pre-injury is a mild satire of powerful people, heirs and the lazy rich, but they’re also very PG-version ( extremely) public image of the woman she portrays.

In fact, we should remember the young Lindsay Lohan for her role in Mean Girls, in which she combined easy relationship skills with a star personality rarely found outside of classic Hollywood. Or since her first appearance in Parent trap, in which she convincingly played identical twins who grew up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, switching accents with ease even when each character had to pretend to be her sister. (It’s a big achievement for a 12-year-old American girl to successfully portray a Brit posing as a native Californian – many adult actors wouldn’t be able to pull it off either.)

Lots of spectators Fall in love with Christmas however, they probably remember her various tabloids better in her teens and twenties when she was drunk and high, drawing parallels between the actress and Sierra’s character. I have no doubt that we are destined to be. I also have no doubt that as we see the character evolve from a carefree rich girl to a compassionate wife and mother-to-be, we should view this change as reflecting a change in Lohan’s image, as if that were the case. in particular, the film suggests that we are experiencing a kind of selective amnesia regarding her former self.

The problem is Lindsay Lohan, although she is delightfully charming. Fall in love with Christmasis most convincing when she’s not cute, and her confident use of slapstick in the film pales in comparison to her ability to play rough, wounded sluts in some of her best recent performances.

Hints of this ability are shown here when she orders an agitated follower to bring a glass of champagne to her lips with nothing more than an impatient, annoyed twitch of her chin, or when she judges the audience’s feelings through her boring judgment of love to… be passed on. interest, and then, almost comatose with contempt, hoarsely ask him: “And you …?”

Lindsay Lohan is a bit like Barbara Stanwyck: both women can switch between comedian and femme fatale without completely sacrificing their edginess, and who constantly exude the feeling that they’ve seen too much to ever be the same again. completely innocent.

It seems shameful that we’re being asked to lightly erase the earlier, more complex and sometimes irritating Lindsay Lohan, especially for her detriment – and even before such confessions were considered “brave”, it should be noted that the actress has been openly and shamelessly in public for years. reflected in her work.

Too bad for Paul Schrader, with whom he has since made two of his best films. Card counter as well as First reformedfailed to successfully resurrect his career with a somewhat lackluster 2013. canyonsthough Lohan is good at it, scared and intimidating in equal measure.

BUT The newspaper “New York Times The profile following her during the filming of this film, titled “Here’s What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie,” portrays her as a complete thorn in the neck, but also touches on much darker issues.

While filming the scene in which she is punched and then thrown against a wall, the play suggests that Lohan received critical acclaim.

“I have a lot of experience with this,” she explains, “from my father.”

Had this story happened, Lohan’s reference to parental abuse might have sparked a bit more controversy amid ongoing new media complaints about the horrendous treatment of celebrities in the 2000s; In its current form, the film failed, retaining the image of a hilarious train wreck.

If Lohan didn’t end up facing the same revisionist feminist reporting as Britney Spears, it may be in part because her wrongdoings are more serious — for example, she was one of the few women to back Harvey Weinstein in the press in a classic and wholly unforgivable defense. that he never harmed or attacked her, and used this as proof of his apparent innocence.

But it’s also partly due to her own desire to pretend her years in the wild never happened and make herself a well-meaning, innocent lover capable of carrying a Netflix Christmas comedy.

Like many millennial women, I’m glad to see Lindsay Lohan blossoming, just as I’m glad to see Britney Spears freed from her father’s legal clutches. However, I hope her ability to show herself and be charming during her two-movie Netflix deal will be enough to convince any serious director to work with her again, and I hope she ends up giving us a little more Alten. your hot-tempered, complex Lindsay Lohan boasts: a girl, yes, but also a “great actress” (Meryl Streep) and “a huge talent with a very sexy voice” (Robert Altman).

If she’s ready to step up and do her job, maybe her audience will finally be ready to accept her in all her mischievous Marlboro-speaking glory, acknowledging that sometimes she’s a bad girl and sometimes a very naughty girl. Girls, but ultimately to remember that in their prime, few did it better.