Might as well face it, actors are addicted to substance abusers.
Before Robert Downey Jr. became one, he played one in Less Than Zero. Before Leonardo DiCaprio went down with the Titanic, he got down with heroin in The Basketball Diaries.
Sandra Bullock, still struggling to escape from the bog of nice-girl roles, apparently figures audiences will forget about Speed if they see her puking in a rehab clinic in the movie 28 Days.
Voila! Here's Bullock as party girl Gwen Cummings, an apparently successful writer (we never see how she earns the rent money) whose lifestyle consists of a cycle of parties, hangovers, and more parties.
Gwen is already several sheets to the wind when she appears at the wedding of her sister (Elizabeth Perkins), where she single-handedly destroys the wedding cake, the limo and the front of a house while under the influence.
She is ordered into the titular sentence in rehab, where she naturally resists the touchy-feely, group-hug kind of rituals practised by Serenity Glen's assortment of predictably cute junkies, coke fiends, alcoholics, and sex addicts, who initially make a bet among themselves to guess just what substance to which Gwen is addicted.
After trying to score drugs from Cornell (Steve Buscemi), who turns out to be her counselor, Gwen starts to confront the fact that she may actually have a problem. Although she never quite embraces the singalongs, she does form attachments with her new friends, including a 17-year-old junkie, a black single mom, a trailer park mama (Diane Ladd), a comic relief gay male German stripper, and a high-living baseball star (Viggo Mortensen).
Throughout, director Betty Thomas attempts to combine quirky comedy with drama, but she doesn't have the subtlety to balance the two. For example, Bullock and Perkins have a particularly nice dramatic moment when the sisters meet to talk out their estrangement. Then Thomas subverts the dramatic tension by training her camera on, say, the male stripper, for the sake of cheap laughs.
The real problem (and God knows Hollywood doesn't like to admit it has a problem) is that people who make movies don't trust drama anymore. They're terrified of depressing audiences, so they bring out the defence mechanism of comedy relief.
That attitude doesn't serve audiences or the star. In one of the first scenes in the film, Bullock resorts to the cliche of wrapping a comforter around herself as she gets out of bed to prevent the audience from seeing her naked, even though she's alone in the bedroom with her longtime lover.
Bullock also covers herself with gratuitous comedy and predictable drama to prevent audiences from seeing the naked truth of addiction.
(This film is rated AA)
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