A comeback to where? Even at her peak, Lindsay Lohan was not yet a 'movie star' or a box office draw. So don't expect her to become one now.

Come what may, last weekend's Saturday Night Live was memorable if only for the uncommonly creative "Real Housewives of Disney" sketch (embedded above).  The not good/not bad hosting job by Ms. Lohan is beside the point, as the whole gimmick was intended to show off that Ms. Lohan is apparently sober, sane, and ready to work again.  And if for no other reason than I don't want to see the gossip industry 'win', I am certainly hopeful that Lohan is indeed back on the 'straight and narrow' (or at least to whatever extent allows her to work in the profession of her choice, plenty of actors engage in vices while maintaining artistic careers).  But the meme that Lindsay Lohan is trying to 'reclaim her stardom' is a false one.  Lindsay Lohan, at her career peak, was never a movie star.  She was, like a lot of actors and actresses at a given point in their career, on the brink of true stardom.  She was ready to capitalize on a few years of popular films (Freaky Friday, The Parent Trap) and just coming off of a massive critical and commercial success (Mean Girls) which had her poised to truly break out.  But she was not yet a star.

She was exactly where Adam Sandler was after The Wedding Singer and before The Waterboy.  He was a known entity who had a series of low-budget/small-return hits and had just broken past his ceiling with the surprisingly successful 80s rom-com (it earned okay reviews and earned $80 million in the middle of Titanic's four month reign of terror).  But it was his next picture, which capitalized on the goodwill accumulated by The Wedding Singer, which catapulted him into the realm of true movie stardom, where he has remained ever since.  Lohan is where, relatively speaking, Will Smith was after Independence Day, basking in the glow of a massive hit that she deserved a large portion of the credit for making into a success.  But just as Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman (and the film itself) deserved some credit for the success of ID4, so too did writer/star Tina Fey and the sheer quality of the film deserve equal billing alongside Lohan.  But Lindsay Lohan never really had her Men In Black or her Waterboy.  Her follow-up projects to Mean Girls were relative box office disappointments (Herbie: Fully Loaded), artier fare that few outside the critical establishment saw (A Prairie Home Companion, Bobby) or outright critical/financial disasters (I Know Who Killed Me, Just My Luck). By 2007, the offstage version of Lohan (the substance abuse issues and various legal problems) had far eclipsed whatever onscreen image she might have had, and the last five years have basically been spent in-and-out of rehab or jail and occasionally 'acting' in projects that were mostly about taking advantage of morbid curiosity than actually showing off Lohan's abilities as an actress.

So while we all hope that Lindsay Lohan finds some measure of success and/or happiness, let's not pretend that she must 'return to the A-list' in order to make good on her theoretical potential.  For better or worse, her career and her personal life took a nose-dive right as she was on the cusp of true stardom, right before she was potentially going to become 'bankable'.  But she never got her Sweet Home Alabama or her Rush Hour.  She vanished into the black hole of gossip-fed self-destruction before she could confirm the promise of stardom.  Unlike Robert Downey Jr., who was also not 'a star' prior to his Iron Man-fueled comeback but had two two decades of well-liked performances in a variety of projects (Pretty In Pink, Chaplin, Ally McBeal, Heart and Souls, etc), Lohan was just getting started on her path to movie stardom and box office glory. Regardless of whether or not Lidnsay Lohan can remake herself as an actress first and a tabloid magnet second (and that will be challenging enough for a myriad of reasons), she is not and never truly was a movie star.  So don't hold it against her if she can't make it 'back to the top'.  She was never at 'the top' to begin with.

Scott Mendelson