Taglines: The Life of the Party… before she got a life.
New York based writer Gwen Cummings knows that she drinks a lot, doesn’t believe it’s a problem, and if she finally decides that it is that she could stop drinking without issue. She and her live-in boyfriend Jasper fuel each other’s hyperactivity with this excessive alcohol consumption, “a normal life” which is not in either’s vocabulary for themselves.
Between Gwen and her older straight-laced sister Lily, Gwen more closely resembles who was their larger than life mother, who was also an addict and who died when they were children. Lily believes that Gwen’s alcohol consumption makes her a difficult if not impossible person to love. While Gwen is in a drunken stupor at Lily’s wedding, Gwen causes one issue after another, ruining the day for Lily. Gwen is forced to examine her drinking with the culmination of bad events she caused at the wedding, leading to her being court ordered to enter into rehab for twenty-eight days, which is only marginally more tolerable an idea to her than the alternative, which is jail.
For Gwen to make any progress, she has to acknowledge that she has a problem which requires the support during those twenty-eight days not only of the facility’s staff, but also the other patients, each who is going through his/her own issue with respect to the demons of addiction. If she does eventually acknowledge the problem, she will also have to reconcile the events of her life with Lily, and come to the realization that a life with Jasper is not in her best interest if she has any chance of surviving outside of the facility after those twenty-eight days.
28 Days is a 2000 American comedy-drama film directed by Betty Thomas. Sandra Bullock plays Gwen Cummings, a newspaper columnist obliged to enter rehabilitation for alcoholism. The film costars Sandra Bullock, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic West, Diane Ladd, Elizabeth Perkins, Steve Buscemi, Alan Tudyk, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Margo Martindale.
Film Review for 28 Days
Every drunk considers himself a special case, unique, an exception to the rules. Odd, since for the practicing alcoholic, daily life is mostly unchanging, an attempt to negotiate daily responsibilities while drinking enough but not too much. When this attempt fails, as it often does, it results in events that the drunk thinks make him colorful. True variety comes only with sobriety. Plus, now he can remember it.
This is the lesson learned by Gwen Cummings, the character played by Sandra Bullock in “28 Days.” As the story opens, her life is either wild and crazy or confused and sad, depending on where you stand. She parties all night with her boyfriend Jasper (Dominic West). After the clubs, the drinks, the designer drugs, they commence what may turn out to be sex, if they can stay awake long enough. Then a candle starts a fire, which they extinguish with champagne. What a ball.
In the morning, Gwen’s day begins with a pass at the refrigerator so smooth and practiced she hardly seems to even open it while extracting a cold beer. Gwen is an accident waiting to happen–to herself or innocent bystanders. Her victim is her sister Lily (Elizabeth Perkins). “Gwen, you make it impossible to love you,” Lily says when she arrives late at the church for Lily’s wedding. At the reception, Gwen delivers an insulting toast, knocks over the cake while dancing, steals a limousine to go buy another cake and crashes it into a house. Not a good day.
Cut to Serenity Glen, where Gwen has been sentenced to 28 days of rehab in lieu of jail time. The PA system makes a running commentary out of “MASH”-style announcements. The patients do a lot of peppy group singing (too much, if you ask me). “I don’t have a health problem,” Gwen protests. “I play Ultimate Frisbee twice a week.” The patients include the usual cuckoo’s nest of colorful characters, although they’re a little more plausible than in most inmate populations. We meet Daniel (Reni Santoni), a doctor who pumped his own stomach to control his drinking and wound up giving himself an emergency tracheotomy. Gerhardt (Alan Tudyk), prissy and critical, a dancer and coke addict. And Andrea (Azura Skye), Gwen’s teenage roommate.
Gwen’s counselor is Cornell, played by Steve Buscemi, who inspires a grin when we see him in a movie because he’s usually good for strange scenes and dialogue. Not this time; he plays the role straight, revealing toughness and a certain weary experience, as if all of Gwen’s cherished kookiness is for him a very, very old joke. There’s a nice scene where she says exactly the wrong things to him before discovering he’s her counselor.
Another fellow patient is Eddie Boone (Viggo Mortensen), a baseball pitcher with a substance abuse problem. Of course they begin a tentative, unstated courtship. Jasper, on weekend visits, misunderstands (“Where are all the celebrities?” he asks on his first arrival, looking around for Elizabeth Taylor). Of course there is a fight. This subplot is predictable, but made perceptive because Gwen and Eddie illustrate the lifeboat mentality in which sailors on the ship of rehab have only each other to cling to.
The movie was written by Susannah Grant, who also wrote Julia Roberts’ hit film “Erin Brockovich.” I differed with “Erin” for the same reason I like “28 Days”: the tone of the central character. I found that Roberts, enormously likable although she is, upstaged the material in “Erin Brockovich” by unwise costume choices and scenes that were too obviously intended as showcases. Bullock brings a kind of ground-level vulnerability to “28 Days” that doesn’t make her into a victim but simply into one more suitable case for treatment. Bullock, like Roberts, is likable, but in “28 Days” at least that’s not the point.
28 Days (2000)
Directed by: Betty Thomas
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic West, Diane Ladd, Elizabeth Perkins, Steve Buscemi, Alan Tudyk, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Margo Martindale, Azura Skye
Screenplay by: Susannah Grant
Production Design by: Marcia Hinds
Cinematography by: Declan Quinn
Film Editing by: Peter Teschner
Costume Design by: Ellen Lutter
Set Decoration by: Debra Schutt
Art Direction by: Bo Johnson
Music by: Richard Gibbs
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements involving substance abuse, language and some sensuality.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: April 14, 2000
Visits: 125
