Remember when alcoholics really were anonymous? The 12-stepping of America is now such a noisy, public process that those who've never been within 50 miles of a rehab center may feel as if they can anticipate everything that happens to Sandra Bullock in "28 days". At the beginning we see Gwen Cummins (Bullock)in full full, degraded celebration mode: guzzling a few wake up brewskies and showing up late for her sister's wedding. By the time she is done inflicting her damage, she has driven a limo into someone's house, and is ordered in lieu of jail time, to spend four weeks at Serenity Glen, a sprawling woodland detox-and-rehabilitation compound where the motto is "Mind Body Spirit." At first we take in the soft soap communal scenes through Gwen's eyes - the righteous, skeptical armor of her denial. Even without booze to light her up she's a firecracker, exploding in defiance at a world which refused to live up to her wishes. Bullock gives it her all - she's bristling and alive on screen in a way she hasn't been before. What's missing from her acting is what's missing from the movie - namely, a deeper more probingly confessional sense of Gwen's demons - of what precisely, the escape of alcohol has meant to her. In "28 days" there is plenty of squalid bad behavior, most of it depicted with engrossing honesty. But we don't get close enough to the inner trauma from which it emerges. It's as if the movie itself had already been through rehab.
