Herald rating: **
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic West, Steve Buscemi
Director: Betty Thomas
Running time: 110 mins
Rating: M
Opens: Now showing, Village, Hoyts
Review: Peter Calder
In the latest instalment in the story of Sandra Bullock trying to find a role that works for her, she plays Gwen Cummings, a New York writer (of what we don't know since the only thing she writes is a deliberately bad spoof in the final reel) and career alcoholic.
When she collapses in the cake at her sister's wedding and then, drunk and half-naked, crashes the limo, she ends up in court-ordered rehab - the 28 days of the title.
So far so predictable, though it gives you an idea of the film's poor command of tone that the audience I saw it with was in stitches at the sight of a drunk emerging from a car wreck, bleeding freely from the head.
Fact is, it's dogged throughout by a fatal uncertainty about what it is. In rehab Gwen is wrestling with demons so real we almost touch them and in these scenes, opposite an excellent Buscemi as her tough-love counsellor, she has more conviction than she's ever got up on screen.
But much of the movie makes cheap fun of the group therapy process (the rehab centre is called Serenity Glen and groups hold hands and chant ridiculous self-affirmations). It's often hilarious, but it undermines what's happening elsewhere and the whole thing turns into a serio-comic mess.
It's almost painful to watch real talent wasting such opportunity: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the black woman from Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, is banal as a grumpy ex-addict and the witty presence of Loudon Wainwright III, whose songs are a sly Greek chorus, seems to have been grafted on as an afterthought (this may be literally true; in a final scene, his face is carefully obscured and whoever's playing the guitar, can't).
Susannah Grant, who wrote the excellent Erin Brockovich, worked hard on the script, it's plain. But it all got away on director Thomas.
28 Days
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