Part public-service message and part private love-triangle. It covers twenty-one days at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and nine days of after-care; but despite the roughly proportionate allotment of screen time, it feels nearer to nine days inside and twenty-one days out. Or better, it feels near enough to twenty-one inside and (keeping the same proportions) forty-nine after. This is by way of a backhanded tribute to the last half-hour of the film, or in other words the triangulated-love part of it, which attains some of the stickiness and messiness of Real Life (before an Act of God comes along to bathe it in the traditional turpentine of Screen Life). The vaunted "dramatic debut" of Michael Keaton, as a coke-sniffing, chain-smoking, escrow-embezzling yuppie who enrolls in the rehab clinic only as a hideout from his boss and the cops, turns out to be strikingly like his prior comedic work. It's mainly the context that's different. (One might dimly be reminded here of those early editing experiments of the Russian pioneer Lev Kuleshov: if an actor of unchanging expression is intercut with shots of, say, a baby in a crib, a plate of roast chicken, and a woman pulling on silk stockings, his "performance" will take on subtle shades of, in turn, tenderness, hunger, and lust.) From that standpoint, those of us who'd been finding Michael Keaton horrid all along will have to be excused for failing to show the proper astonishment over his intended horridness here. With Kathy Baker and Morgan Freeman; directed by Glenn Gordon Caron. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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