28 Days
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday,
April 14
Diane Ladd also plays an addict in the film.
Are drug addicts funny? Director Betty Thomas (Private
Parts, Dr. Dolittle) certainly thinks so, although
to what extent remains uncertain. Her latest feature, the
muddled, inconsistent 28 Days, reflects comedic confusion.
Attempting to be a tragi-comic look at the inhabitants of
a drug rehab center (Arthur goes on The Lost Weekend),
the film darts around incoherently, misses every beat of
humor and, finally, embarrasses itself with schlocky sentimentality.
The movie feels like one of those disjointed, liquored-up
toasts given by a non-family member at a wedding party--only
not as funny.
Sandra Bullock plays Gwen Cummings, a hip, big-city newspaper
columnist who has a cool British boyfriend (Dominic West)
and a party-hard lifestyle. She looooves to drink. So much,
in fact, that at the wedding of her sister (Elizabeth Perkins),
she gets plastered, destroys the cake, steals the "Just
Married" limo and smashes it into a house, all the while
being as comically cute as Sandra Bullock can be. After
this disaster, she is sent to a court-ordered rehab facility
for 28 days of chanting, singing, detox and sharing with
a handful of other "wacky" addicts. Initially annoyed by
the gross, touchy-feely place (the inhabitants continually
sing "Lean on Me") and so rebellious that she goes AWOL
twice, she soon learns of her deep-seated problem and accepts
the program.
Unfortunately, we're the ones who have the real trouble
getting with the 28 Days program. Instead of exploring
why Gwen is so messed up, we get some brief, stylishly murky
childhood flashbacks of her drunken mother passing out on
the kitchen floor. We also meet a series of one-note, underdeveloped,
ridiculously stupid characters who might be funny if this
movie understood the sensibility behind Shakes the Clown,
a film where the point was to make fun of drunks' sometimes-funny,
sometimes-cruel altered mind state.
The seriousness of addiction is conveyed in this movie
by, of all people, Steve Buscemi. Against type, Buscemi
plays Counselor Cornell, a humorless (if you can believe
it) addict who lectures Gwen on sobriety without a single
Buscemi-ism--except for those lips and eyes--in sight. Playing
the straight man is a noble move for an actor who has portrayed
some of the best drunks ever seen on celluloid (observe
his performance in his own Trees Lounge and his hilarious
groomsman in The Wedding Singer) but, given how scant
and dour his part is here, he is never able to expand into
anything more than a stock, movie-of-the-week AA counselor.
What a pity--if anything could have saved this movie from
its lack of edgy cleverness, it could have been Buscemi,
the man who made Con Air compelling.
It's up to Bullock to supply the film with the complexity
it so disastrously lacks--and she tries, valiantly. The
actress known for her charming, down-to-earth characters
in Speed and While You Were Sleeping doesn't
spring to mind to portray a DT-addled drunk, but her lightness
works to her advantage here. She rarely overacts, and her
reactions to fellow addicts are funny and realistic. For
example, in one scene she conveys her perplexity and repulsion
to an addict's "sharing" with very authentic cringing rather
than dewy-eyed understanding.
Though Bullock shows promise in shedding her good-girl
image, she suffers under meager scripting (surprisingly,
by Susannah Grant, the scribe of the great Erin Brockovich)
and direction so muddy that by the time Gwen reaches her
one-day-at-a-time epiphany, we simply don't care. In fact,
we liked her better as a drunk. Now isn't that funny?
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 12,
2000
|
