On the celebrity rehabilitation tour, “Chelsea Lately†is a halfway house on the way to Oprah Winfrey. And Lindsay Lohan, fresh out of rehab and promoting a low-budget curiosity of a film directed by Paul Schrader, gratefully filled in for Chelsea Handler on her E! talk show.
The cost of flopping is low on “Chelsea Lately†because it’s a small, self-mocking late-night comedy show that celebrates raunchiness and bad judgment. (One of the ads is for Hornitos Tequila.) A successful star turn there can’t wipe a bad reputation clean, but it can buoy a troubled celebrity’s confidence.
Ms. Lohan did a perfectly good job of replacing Ms. Handler and seems well on her way to the 12th step of show-business comebacks, a sit-down on “Oprah’s Next Chapter,†on Ms. Winfrey’s OWN network later this month. And the fact that Ms. Lohan is once again a welcome guest on talk shows - and not just the tabloids - is a testament less to the actress’s resilience than the public’s enduring fascination with failure.
There are so many stars who succumb to excess: James Gandolfini, 51, the star of “The Sopranos†died in June of a heart attack. Cory Monteith of “Glee†died of an overdose last month. It’s hard to watch Ms. Lohan joke about her record, even self-deprecatingly, and she was careful to add parenthetical disclaimers on either side of a punch line. She referred to her 90-day stay at a California rehab center as a “lovely, court-ordered vacation in Malibu.†She let the audience laugh, then added, “But, no, on a real note, it was really great and wonderful. It was.â€
Ms. Lohan gets special attention because she was a promising, beloved child star (“The Parent Trapâ€) before she became a slow-motion train wreck. She hasn’t made a good film in years, and her recent career trajectory â€" a Playboy spread, a television movie in which she played Elizabeth Taylor and, now, “The Canyons,†an art film in which she plays opposite a porn star â€" has few high points. The public has spent the last few years watching her performances in courtrooms; now she is back onstage in the third act of celebrity repentance.
And she is pretty elastic in the part - mixing dutiful curtsies of regret with glimmers of saucy defiance. “How come when Kanye acts like an idiot, he gets a gold record, but when I act like an idiot, I get a police record?†she said.
There’s no comparison, actually, between narcissistic self-promotion and willful self-destruction. Ms. Lohan is less worrisomely thin now than she was before rehab, but her appearance is still disconcerting: she is a 27-year-old actress with the poofy lips and tight skin of an older woman trying to look young.
And in that sense, at least, she is well cast in her current role. This is not her first time on the comeback trail, and each return from the brink turns more fraught. When David Letterman interviewed Ms. Lohan in April, shortly before she was due to begin this latest rehab program, he sounded more like a truant officer than a comedian. She seemed startled and offended by Mr. Letterman’s brutal questioning but gamely tried to play along.
On Monday, she was in charge, bantering with a panel of comedians, and chatting with Dylan Bruce, a star of “Orphan Black.†Mostly, however, she tried, once again, to clear the slate. At one point, she picked up a newspaper with the headline “Lohan Needs Therapy.†She said sarcastically, “Yeah,†then tossed the paper behind her.
Ms. Lohan gave a pretty good performance on Monday, but it will be a while before audiences trust that she has actually changed her life.
