FOR a Hollywood comedy about alcohol rehab starring Sandra Bullock, “28 Days” is much less mawkish and predictable than you might expect.
Director Betty Thomas (a former “Hill Street Blues” star), working from a screenplay by Susannah Grant, deftly avoids one corny pitfall after another and ends up with a movie that is both exuberantly funny and surprisingly dry.
Thomas directed “Dr. Dolittle,” “Howard Stern’s Private Parts” and “The Brady Brunch,” and whenever she must choose between a scene of Robin Williams-esque sentimentality and a good joke, she goes straight for the joke.
It’s also Sandra Bullock’s best film in years – perhaps even the best work she has ever done.
Given her past proclivity for starring in mediocre thrillers and schlockfests, this might not sound like high praise, but the movie shows that, given the right material, Bullock has the acting chops to carry a movie in which she isn’t playing the sweet girl next door.
Gwen (Bullock) is a hard-partying, wise-cracking New Yorker whose drinking has gotten so out of hand that she ruins the wedding of her square sister Lily (Elizabeth Perkins) before crashing a limo into a suburban house.
Sentenced to a month of rehab in lieu of prison, she is horrified by the chanting, singing and confessional psychobabble that greet her at Serenity Glen, not to mention the rules that forbid cell phones and coffee.
Gwen has no intention of obeying the rules. And when her charming, dissolute boyfriend (Dominic West in a dead-on performance that’s already making him a new Hollywood name) comes down to visit, they steal away from the institute and get wasted.
Of course, you know that Gwen will have to lose some of her self-conscious cynicism before she can start getting better. But though the rehabilitation process involves inherent melodrama (especially during “family week”) and weepy public confessions, the film never forces you to believe that a cynical, sophisticated New Yorker like Gwen would ever sing “Lean on Me” without embarrassment.
Nor do any miracles occur among her fellow inmates. The disgraced former doctor played by Rene Santoni is just as obnoxious after a month of treatment as he was before.
Bullock is surrounded by a strong supporting cast, particularly Steve Buscemi as an addiction counselor. And Gwen’s therapy group includes characters played by the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Secrets and Lies”), Alan Tudyk (“Patch Adams”) and Diane Ladd.
“A Walk on the Moon” heartthrob Viggo Mortensen is convincing as a Southern baseball star and alternative love interest, and Azura Skye plays a teenager addicted to both soap operas and heroin.
So many Hollywood movies that deal with emotionally charged subjects feel fake. This one doesn’t, perhaps because addiction and rehab are the kind of phenomena that many people who work on movies like this are familiar with.
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28 DAYS
Less sentimental and politically correct than you might expect, this comedy about a cynical New Yorker at a rehab clinic shows that Sandra Bullock is much more than a second-string Julia Roberts. Running time: 103 minutes. Rated PG-13. At the Lincoln Square, the 42nd Street E-Walk, the Union Square, others.