Lifetime’s Liz & Dick, a chintzy biography of the tumultuous love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is easily one of the most talked about and high profile television movies in recent memory, if not in the history of the oft-maligned genre. But it would be a mistake to imagine that most of the folks anticipating it with crazed glee expect anything even vaguely resembling quality. No, the cult of Liz & Dick (and it’s a measure of the project’s weird notoriety that it seems to have a cult before it even aired) is largely composed of camp aficionados and schadenfreude enthusiasts delighted to see the perpetually struggling, eternally troubled Lindsay Lohan once again flamboyantly embarrass herself publicly, though in a strange twist, this time they’re excited to see her embarrass herself through her chosen trade and not her off-screen shenanigans.
Liz & Dick seems custom-made for the curious custom of “hate-watching”: deliberately watching campy junk or shows otherwise deemed annoyances for the purpose of mocking them, whether through live-Tweeting, viewing parties, or just cackling maniacally at moments that are supposed to be somber and filled with meaning. Liz & Dick arrives on the small screen with a giant “kick me” sign rooted both in Lohan’s tabloid infamy and the sad overreaching of trying to chronicle an epic love affair that unfolded across continents and decades on a tiny television movie budget.
The intense fascination surrounding Liz & Dick has a lot to do with the parallels between Elizabeth Taylor and Lohan’s lives. Both were child stars who grew into smoky sexpots whose stormy love lives and career foibles captivated the tabloid media and a voyeuristic public. In fact, the tabloid press might as well have been created specifically to document Burton and Taylor’s extra-marital fling on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra. Lohan’s life and career so eerily echo Taylor (minus, you know, the great films, Oscars, longevity, and extraordinary talent) that her performance in Liz & Dick reeks of clumsy self-parody even if, ironically, Lohan doesn’t really look or sound anything like Taylor.
Liz & Dick’s idiotic framing device has its stars dressed in all black like beatnik theater students and sitting in director chairs while talking about their love affair directly to the camera. This device consciously or unconsciously recalls the direct-to-camera confessionals of reality television, which, at root, isn’t a bad analogy. Liz & Dick posits Taylor and Burton as the first reality stars, shameless exhibitionists whose lives and love played out in a series of screaming tabloid headlines and public stunts. Judging by the film, the great stars lived their lives as if there was a camera pointed on them at all times, which wasn’t too far from the truth. And, like contemporary reality stars, Burton and Taylor screamed and whined and fought their way through a train wreck of a relationship in ways that dared audiences and an endlessly fascinated public to look away.
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