28 DAYS
Rated PG-13 - Running Time: 1:43 - Released 4/14/00
After abandoning acting 10 years ago for the director's chair,
Betty Thomas has had a rather spotty career, helming such a dubiously
eclectic variety of films as The Brady Bunch Movie (1995),
Private Parts (1997), and Dr.
Dolittle (1998). Her latest opus, 28 Days, written
by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich),
combines her uneven touch with Grant's emotional oversimplification,
resulting in a product that alternately hits and misses —
surprisingly astute in some scenes, surprisingly corny or trite
in others. This film will likely be compared to last December's
Girl, Interrupted, a
story set in a women's psychiatric facility, but to find something
more akin to the subject, one must go all the way back to the
1988 Michael Keaton film Clean And Sober, about the experience
of an alcoholic/drug user drying out in rehab. And even if 28
Days oversimplifies and sometimes mocks the gravity of the
subject, it provides Sandra Bullock with the opportunity to do
some adequate work. Good performances by those around her help
greatly to compensate for the script's logical errors and flippant
tone.
After ruining her sister's (Elizabeth Perkins) wedding by making
an inappropriate toast, squishing the wedding cake, and wrecking
the limo into a nearby house, alcoholic party girl Gwen (Bullock)
is given a choice: she can either serve jail time or spend a month
in the Serenity Glen Rehabilitation Center in Bedford, New York.
Although she is accustomed to drinking beer for breakfast and
enjoying an unlimited supply of Vicodin, ostensibly for back pain,
she is thereafter not even allowed caffeinated coffee, since it
is considered "mood altering." (Of course, she and everyone
else still smokes like a chimney.) The facility, not just for
drug and alcohol abusers, serves a wide range of addicts, including
Gwen's roommate Andrea (Azura Skye), who is hooked on a TV soap
opera, Eddie (Viggo Mortensen), a pro baseball star addicted to
cocaine and sex, and Gerhardt (Alan Tudyk), a German homosexual
whose principal reason for being there is to make fun of Germans
and homosexuals. The only one Gwen wants to see, however, is her
wacky boyfriend Jasper (Dominic West), who smuggles drugs to her
whenever he visits.
As in Clean And Sober, our protagonist goes through
various emotional and mental states when she enters the clinic,
including open hostility, fear, delirium, derision toward other
patients, and denial of her addictions. She makes escape attempts,
refuses to join in the group's chanting sessions, withdraws from
therapy, and inadvertently asks her counselor (Steve Buscemi)
for drugs before realizing she has a problem. Finally through
the love and support of her fellow abusers, she discovers the
meaning of life. A pretty shallow plot, but it has a few moments.
It's a clever touch (and I wonder if it's even intentional) on the part of director Thomas to associate Gwen's drug/alcohol flashbacks with the music of David Crosby and Three Dog Night's Chuck Negron, two of the rock world's most famous rehabilitated drug addicts. Bullock is adequate in her mixed-up state, and there are many funny moments involving the motley crew of fellow "inmates," but I can't help feeling that this film makes recovering from drug addiction look like a hilarious experience filled with clever wisecracks and funny caricatures. A grave subject is dealt with at one point, but mostly we just see the camaraderie between formerly agressive fellow addicts. This film covers an issue too serious to be taken lightly, and I'm not sure if its writer or director understand that. ***½