Film review: 28 Days

Directed by Betty Thomas,
Columbia Pictures
On worldwide general release

Twenty eight days is apparently how long you normally stay if-after getting disgustingly drunk and wrecking your sister's wedding, not to mention the nuptial limousine-you reluctantly enter an American "rehabilitation" clinic. Rehabilitation is big business in the United States, and remarkably monolithic.

28 Days gives a reasonably accurate impression of life in a typical private rehabilitation facility and of some of its highs and lows. The highs include heart warming insights of the "I guess I never saw it that way" variety and the support and experience of other addicts. But, although you may feel uplifted by some of your fellow sufferers, the film also shows how others can depress you, offer you dope, or involve you in damaging relationships when you're feeling lonely and vulnerable.

Like most US rehabilitation programmes, the one in the film is based on the "twelve steps" advocated by Alcoholics Anonymous. Eclectic it isn't, and no other approach gets a look in. Whilst it is undoubtedly important to accept that you have a problem, being on a "twelve steps" programme means having to get up in a group and say things like, "Hello, my name's Cheryl, and I'm an alcoholic." This, of course, can be adapted to "I'm a heroin/cocaine/gambling/shopping/sex/soap opera addict" (delete as necessary). The film suggests that US rehabilitation involves lots of hugs, tears, group chants, and saccharine effusions of Panglossian optimism. This is not everyone's cup of tea. Medication is banned even for nasty withdrawal symptoms or a badly sprained ankle from jumping out of a window to retrieve some smuggled narcotics.

Unfortunately for the plot, subtlety and irony are also prohibited substances. The drunken, good time heroine, played by Sandra Bullock, sees the light, helped apparently by a horse who doubles as a therapist (I don't think I was hallucinating this bit). She eventually does the right thing with her ghastly drunken boyfriend, who is, incidentally, English. There were few people in the cinema at the start and even fewer by the end. Maybe it plays better in Los Angeles or Pensacola. Call us a tight arsed nation, but, despite the emergence of a few home grown Oprah Winfreys, the confessional culture doesn't seem to do too well here. As the writer Alan Bennett confided to his diary after he was taken to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York, I felt like getting up and saying, "Hello my name's Alan and I'm English and we don't do this sort of thing."

Colin Brewer, specialist in addiction medicine, Stapleford Centre, London


studentBMJ 2000;08:259-302 August ISSN 0966-6494