On its face, it wouldn’t seem such a strange thing to cast Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor. Both were child stars who turned into alluring young women, who were forever followed by tabloids, which for a time defined them.
But as the surprisingly awful “Liz & Dick” (Lifetime, 9 p.m.) clearly indicates, she’s completely wrong for it, with her freckles still visible beneath what is supposed to be a porcelain skin; worse, her face is all puffy from all manner or injections, work or touchups, such that her lips and cheeks all artificially stick out making her look too old for the part and way out of her league.
Her casting is almost as if for a parody; she doesn’t put much more interest in it than that.
She’s cast against Grant Bowler, who at least has the skills to try and become Richard Burton in voice and action, but physically he’s just as wrong: gangly and tall where Burton was squat and compact.
You watch “Liz & Dick” with a certain kind of slack-jawed disbelief: Didn’t the filmmakers notice how wrong everything was going? Or did they think people wouldn’t notice? At some point did they think they had made a movie so grotesquely bad, it would become a kind of cult film? Is there some foreign market they are going to sell this where it will all look just fine? Or did they just not care at all?
It’s that fascinating notion that keeps one watching, as they try to reproduce the sets of things like “Cleopatra” and otherwise fill the screen with period atmosphere. Even if the central couple was better acted and had a modicum of chemistry, it would still be hard to get past what awful people they were, unlikable, amoral, selfish, whiny.
Not that today’s crop of tabloid stars are any better, but you’d like to think there were standards half a century ago.
The story is told in amusing looks back and ends, as Burton’s life did, abruptly.
When a message at the end of the film flashes, meant to show her lifelong devotion, it says Liz kept Richard’s letters until the end of her life. Well so what? What does that prove? I kept letters from eighth grade flames whose faces I can’t quite picture all these years later.