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Betty Thomas, best known after "Hill Street Blues" as the director of such comedies as The Brady Bunch Movie and Private Parts, said in a recent TV interview that when this script about a self-destructive writer's stint in rehab was given to her, she couldn't understand why. It wasn't funny. But she liked the story, so she set about to make it funny. I thought, oh, great. Cute drug addicts. "Dr. Doolittle Dries Out." All it needs is a talking bong.
Surprise. Just because her last two movies have starred Eddie Murphy and Howard Stern doesn't mean she can't do justice to a more serious star and subject. Okay, calling Sandra Bullock a serious actress is a stretch. But in the same manner that Michael Keaton took a dramatic turn with 1988's Clean and Sober, Bullock shows that, with the right material -- this was written by Erin Brockovich scribe Susannah Grant -- she's capable of more than the fluff that's worked for her so far.
She plays Gwen, whose drunken crash of a limo purloined from her sister's wedding earns not only sibling animus, but a choice of punishments from a sympathetic judge. Opting for an upstate New York clinic rather than a downstate jail, she drops in on a posse of fellow substance-abusers at a mountain retreat -- "Deliverance country surrounded by a bunch of sober freaks" -- stocked with more chanting, group therapy, and Outward Bound than she can handle. Fortunately, she thinks, her equally dependent but good-natured boyfriend (Dominic West, from A Midsummer Night's Dream) makes regular visits to smuggle in booze and prescriptions. Unfortunately, she thinks, a no-nonsense counselor (Steve Buscemi) threatens to ship her now very unpretty self to the Orange Coverall Hotel is she doesn't shape up.
The whole thing isn't anywhere nearly as comical as the trailers make it look. Most of the humor comes from Gwen's bullheaded denial and her initially forced interaction with the other patients, an oddball but still reasonably realistic (for New York) cross-section that includes a teenage heroin-user (Azura Skye) also addicted to soap opera; a major-league hurler (Viggo Mortensen), as in baseball pitcher, not projectile vomiter, which kind of thing is tastefully downplayed considering the setting; a gay German performance artist (Alan Tudyk); and a defrocked surgeon (an excellent portrayal from Rena Santoni, best known as Poppy from "Seinfeld"). But the heart of the story is Gwen's coming to grip with her behavior and its roots in her mother's own alcoholism. Uplifting but thankfully devoid of unrealistically rosy, oversimplified resolution, 28 Days is about as welcome a treatise on the issue addiction as you're going to get from an industry hardly known for sobriety. B
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