At last, the time has come to discuss a seminal film in my recovery media canon—a movie I’ve obliquely referenced in this newsletter, but never given the full Making A Scene treatment: 28 Days.
The star-studded film hit theaters in 2000, and I have watched it countless times since. Sandra Bullock plays Gwen, a binge-drinking party girl who reluctantly finds herself in inpatient treatment for addiction. Along the way, we meet her long-suffering and (understandably) uptight sister, Lily (Elizabeth Perkins), Gwen’s boyfriend, Jasper (Dominic West), her rehab counselor, Cornell (my king, Steve Buscemi), as well as an assortment of substance-addicted misfits who we’ll come to know and—perhaps begrudgingly—love by the end of the movie.
I love 28 Days for many reasons—some personal, some narratively—but all because of how it handles certain aspects of recovery. The few people I’ve found who have seen the movie (even independently of an interest in recovery) love it. The critics and reviewers on the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes? Not so much: The movie has a meager 33% from critics and only a 50% audience (“popcornometer”) score.
If you haven’t seen the film (or it’s been a while), all you need to know is that Gwen, the aforementioned binge drinker, ruins her sister’s wedding by...doing all the things you might expect a prodigious drinker to do: She flails on the dance floor, loses her balance, and topples onto the wedding cake. In an attempt to rectify the situation, she steals the “Just Married” limo (after stripping off her bridesmaid gown) and drives it through an unassuming neighborhood looking for “a cake store,” before crashing the limo into a house. You know, classic blackout drunk wedding guest things.
Following her escapades, Gwen is given two options: jail or inpatient treatment; she wisely chooses the latter, and the bulk of the movie takes place in rehab.
Immediately, it’s clear that our gal is uninterested in sobriety. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, Gwen walks down to the lake (of course there’s a lake) to find Cornell (Steve Buscemi) smoking a cigarette. Out of cigarettes and without other substances to take the edge off, she offers him “all the money in her bank account if she could just bum one of those smokes.”
So much happens in this short interaction, and it’s one example of what makes Sandra Bullock’s performance in this so great. Gwen’s jitters are palpable, but like any true Bad Kid, she sees the guy smoking away from the hubbub of everyone else and immediately assumes he’s a fellow misanthrope who doesn’t want to be in treatment and is possibly her best option to procure a substance with a “little more kick.”
As someone who’s made many friends by identifying a fellow misfit substance user hiding their addiction under the guise of being a too-cool-for-school outsider, every note of this scene rings true. If you ever became friends with the quiet kid smoking weed behind the gym at a pep rally, or skipped Freshman orientation to smoke cigarettes and loftily scoff at the childishness of capture the flag, you know what I mean. For his part, Buscemi’s deadpan silence somehow manages to scream “you’re fucked” better than the actual words ever could.
In this one-plus minute scene, Gwen’s attitude toward treatment and sobriety is made abundantly clear. She doesn’t have a problem. She doesn’t need to be here. Rehab is not for people like her. Cool people. Smart people. Writers. Someone with a job, a boyfriend, friends.
For proof, Gwen argues, look no further than the rest of her cohort—substance-addicted losers with whom she would never interact in real life. They need to be here, she explains to Cornell. They’ve got the wrong guy; her being here is all a big mistake.
The perfectly cast Buscemi tries to remind his gum-snapping patient that her options were rehab or jail, and if she doesn’t want to take the first option, he’s more than happy to arrange a transfer to the second.
Gwen takes this warning about as seriously as she takes any warning, which is to say, she sneaks out of visiting day with Jasper and returns later that night looking like she’s on her way home from a bar crawl.
In Cornell’s office the next day, he explains to Gwen that sneaking out of rehab to get wasted is exactly the kind of thing that gets you kicked out of rehab, and she’ll be transferred to jail the following morning. After trying and (shockingly) failing to convince him that she can quit drinking anytime she wants, she scurries upstairs to her room, where the following scene unfolds.
I can’t remember exactly when I first saw this movie, certainly before I got sober. But for the next seven years, or however long it was until I got sober, one line from this movie—from Buscemi’s speech—was etched into my brain: “If anyone had a clue how wrong it felt for you to be sober, they wouldn’t even think of asking you to stay that way. They’d say shit, man, do it...do whatever you need to do to feel like a normal human being again.”
I remember thinking, exactly. Everyone who thinks I drink too much just doesn’t get it. The part that didn’t land so squarely in my teenage brain was that the words that were making me feel so seen and understood were coming from a character who, moments later, explains that he woke up one morning on an unknown street with no idea how he got there, covered in blood.
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As Cornell narrates the story of his “rock bottom,” we watch Gwen hit hers—launching herself out the window after the stash of Vicodin she tossed out the window to prove she didn’t need.
Her crash landing is the wake-up call one might have expected her to have after actually crashing a car into someone’s home, but, hey, it takes what it takes. She manages to convince Cornell to stop her transfer to jail and let her have a second chance at treatment. Predictably, her fellow patients aren’t as forgiving. The following scene feels so true to (at least my experience of) rehab that it still delights me every time I watch it. Also, Alan Tudyk as Gerhart (the blonde guy with glasses) is amazing (in this scene and throughout the movie).
Our Gwen has officially cracked (in a good way). She’s accepted that she doesn’t use substances like “normal” people and needs help to get sober. Her air of terminal uniqueness is getting pummeled by the other people in her group, and her wall of cool indifference and judgment has been replaced by raw emotion.
Perhaps most surprisingly, at least to Gwen, that raw emotion is celebrated by the very people who had just berated her. Finally, she is expressing how she truly feels. The tiny smile on her face as she settles back in her chair lets us know that their unexpected approval matters to her. She’s no longer looking down at them; these are her peers.
It’s worth pausing here and noting that the rehab industry has a long, terrible history of using humiliation and abuse to “break down” residents who they see as resisting the program, and it’s deeply wrong and ineffectual. I realize that there’s a hint of that in this scene. But if I think it crossed a line into humiliation or abuse, I wouldn’t have picked this movie for MAS.
To me, the scene reads like the airing of legitimate grievances by a group of people trying to do a very hard thing, and feeling as though one of the members of said group isn’t taking it seriously—is, in fact, getting away with breaking rules that exist for legitimate reasons.
The rest of the film follows Gwen as she navigates the remainder of her treatment, including reckoning with her past and potential future. I won’t reveal more than that, but if you’re interested and haven’t seen the movie, please watch and let me know your thoughts.
What I love most about this movie is how well it depicts the strangest thing that happens in recovery: The speed with which people you would never encounter in “real life”—people you might think are weird, annoying, or obnoxious—become your life preservers and comrades in arms.
When I went to treatment in January of 2008, one of the women in my cohort was among the most annoying people I’ve ever encountered. At no point during my 28 days did this woman become less annoying.
But if this lady ever called me at 2 am from the parking lot of a liquor store she was debating whether to enter, I would be in my car and on my way to her in two seconds flat. Her 100% sheer obnoxiousness would have no bearing on whether or not I showed up to drive her away from that liquor store and to an all-night diner. Rehab taught me that you don’t have to like someone to understand and empathize with their pain—or take an active role when asked for help.
And that’s the most annoying person I could think of. What happens more often is that your cohort of misfit drug users can become some of the closest friends you’ll ever make. You wouldn’t have ever been friends in “real life,” but how real was that life? The one where you lied to everyone, hid bottles, and no one ever understood why you couldn’t just stop.
That bizarre and beautiful alchemization is what makes 28 Days succeed. Sure, it has moments of cringy cheesiness endemic to all feel-good movies of that era (if anyone expected me to end a chant with NOOOOOO DRUGS, I would SIMPLYYYYY DIE! And no one can convince me equine therapy as depicted in the movie is a real thing), but what the film gets absolutely right is the emotional trajectory of a specific type of rehab experience.
So why did the critics hate it so much? Apparently, according to the Los Angeles Times, in a sentiment echoed by many other reviewers, “28 Days is too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.”
The gist of these reviews is that the film is too lighthearted for such a serious subject. I could point out the many serious and genuinely heartbreaking parts of the film, but I’d rather focus on the fact that recovery—especially the kind that comes through a motley crew of people with addiction—can be joyful, absurd, and hilarious. That the funniest, silliest things can make you laugh until you cry right before the life-and-death stakes of addiction reappear, as stark as ever.
Plus, it’s a helluva cast.
If you’ve seen the movie, let’s chat about it in the comments. If you haven’t, go watch it and join us!
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“It’s very important that I did not kill this plant” - I LOVE this movie
ngl I always assumed that the people (critics) who didn’t like it probs felt that rehab should be a punish the entire time, no fun allowed. Which probably reveals more about what they think of people who struggle with addiction than they mean to. Released in the same era that (at least here in aus) we were talking about the “addiction gene”, which for my family, was a huge step towards unburdening some of the shame. We don’t bring it up anymore (lol thats a one way ticket to medical discrimination), but I would be interested to see if researchers have made a link between adhd and this “addiction gene”. It’s kind of interesting to look at media and see how we ping pong between framing addiction as a moral shame vs something we have zero agency over (thus there’s no point trying to manage it) and back again.
Sandra Bullock is so great in this movie. Incredible slice of life film. I really liked it when I was younger cos it felt like women didn’t get to have these sorts of Going Thru A Time movies without them being romantic dramas or overly schmaltzy.