The Tragedy (and Unmitigated Disaster) of Lifetime's Liz and Dick

The poster that started it all,
and where it should've ended too.

The romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton was the most iconic of the 20th century. Every move they made was front-page news. Their drunken fights were legendary. They were deemed vagrants by US Congress and the Vatican. They spent ten years in fantastic, outrageous, excessive splendor that you couldn't possibly make up.

And yet, somehow, Liz and Dick made that extraordinary romance extraordinarily dull.

For that alone, this movie should be regarded as one of the biggest failures in television history.

Watching Lifetime's interpretation of Elizabeth's fifth and sixth marriage was exhausting, for all the wrong reasons. It should boggle the mind that such a volatile couple could be so easily reduced to a simpering, whining, irritating, boozing mess. There were times when I was just bored, watching Grant Bowler and Lindsay Lohan go through the perceived motions of being the Burtons: the yelling, the kissing, and the pathetic throwing of wine glasses at each other. There were absolutely no fireworks, no chemistry, just a whole bunch of noise that amounted to nothing.

A lot of blame will fall on the performance of Lindsay Lohan, since this was touted as her huge comeback role. She was absolutely terrible in it, for sure. She failed miserably as the last great screen goddess. She delivered a performance both lifeless and histrionic, which is everything Taylor was not. There was not a moment of pathos or nuance in her scenes, nothing that would make us understand why Taylor was the way she was. But I don't think it was completely her fault. Yes, her British accent was there eight percent of the time, and she can't throw a bottle to save her life, but there were glimpses of a modicum of talent there. But between the tragedy of a script, the awful pacing, and the outrageously incompetent direction, I'm not sure there was much to be done for her. Maybe if this film was an actual full-length motion picture with an actual budget, then maybe her performance could've been salvaged. Unfortunately, this performance she gave will probably go down as the moment her career officially died. Grant Bowler, who had material just as bad as Lohan's, did much better, effectively carrying the film for them both. Still, both delivered performances well beneath their talents, and Lohan certainly gave the worst performance of her career, one she may never live down.

The blame lies much more with the direction than with the acting, though. For starters, the dialogue was ridiculous. Even Liz and Dick's infamous jibes at each other were limp. The way their history was spread out in the film was even worse, with way too much attention paid to their time on the set of Cleopatra, and not enough to the rest of the ten-year marriage. They basically skipped over their divorce and his death. The scenes were short, lifeless, and almost purposeless, even the tentpole moments. The scenes of the two playing in their films, particularly Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, were cringeworthy (that can be chalked up to Lohan's acting; easily the worst of her career). Then there was the most astonishing thing besides Lohan's acting, the use of a green screen when the couple was in Italy. I will grant the producers that the movie was filmed on a cable television budget, but they seriously couldn't afford a set? And I've seen better backdrops in movies that Taylor has starred in: how sad is that?

If anything, Liz and Dick is less a television movie than a cautionary tale of how not to make one. It wasn't even smart enough to be exploitative, or interesting enough to be trashy. Instead, what Lifetime delivered was a shameless but failed attempt to cash in on the death of Elizabeth Taylor and the desire for a revival of Lindsay Lohan's career. To be frank, Lifetime deserves to be canceled for airing this disastrous farce.