Georgia Rule is an icky film. Individual parts are quite competent, even likable. But taken on the whole, it's skewed and ethically suspect. The problem is that the central conflict, which gets stretched out over the entire narrative, is whether a high school senior (Lindsay Lohan) is lying about being sexually molested by her stepfather (Cary Elwes) since she was 12. This is a perfectly reasonable topic for a serious drama. But it's not such a good topic for a movie that's trying to be folksy, whimsical, and slapstick, trying to attract fans both of traditional romantic comedies and of Southern feminist-lite movies like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes. The title of Garry Marshall's movie is no coincidence in this regard, even if "Georgia" is the name of the character played by Jane Fonda, not the state. Fonda is probably the best thing going here. She shows a likability that was absent from her comeback in Monster-in-Law (2005), and there's plenty of spunk and spitfire to her Idaho grandmother full of rules and life philosophies. In fact, she does such a good job coming across as a salt-of-the-earth type whose tough love disguises a transparently soft interior, it's difficult to understand how she turned out such a messed up daughter (played by Felicity Huffman) and granddaughter (Lohan). The possible abuse of Lohan's Rachel offers an explanation for her problems, but Huffman's drunkard Lilly doesn't have an excuse for her own disagreeability, except that it's necessary for plot mechanics. And back to that icky part, regarding Lohan: it's the point of the film that Rachel's past has made her sexually aggressive, but there's a thin line between dramatizing this character trait and exploiting Lohan's physical attributes for prurient reasons. Georgia Rule steps over that line, and out of bounds.