OSCARS 2021: Four Good Days (2021)

I feel like I'm pretty aware of the modern film landscape. I check out the list of new releases every week. I look at the weekend box office results. Yet, in this age of peak streaming, it's easy even for someone as plugged-in to cinematic happenings as me to miss stuff. Services that I don't subscribe to each have high-profile exclusives. And it seems each of these streaming services have considerable Oscar campaign budgets. Presumably this is how “Four Good Days,” a Hulu exclusive I had never heard of, got an Oscar nomination. Granted, the film only got that nomination because perennial nominee Diane Warren wrote an original song for it. I could probably judge fairly just by listening to the song but, due to my obsessive-compulsive desire to see all the nominations, I had to watch “Four Good Days” too. 

One fateful day, Molly appears on Deb's doorstep. Molly is Deb's daughter and has been struggling with drug addiction for ten years. She's been in rehab fifteen times and is such a junkie that she has to shoot up through her gums now. But she wants to get clean this time. Deb has a lot of reasons not to trust her daughter, who has stolen from her countless times to buy drugs. Yet she takes her in this time. A doctor offers to give her an opioid antagonist shot that could keep her off drugs but she has to stay sober for four days first. What follows is a tense week, as Deb watches out for her daughter, who is struggling to uphold her end of the promise.

I hate to speak about anyone in these terms but the yearly awards season cycle does bring with it certain expectations. Period pieces are going to get costume nominations. Biopics will score acting nominations. And a beautiful woman is going to pile on make-up to make herself “ugly,” impressing Academy voters by playing someone so different from herself. Mila Kunis, once voted sexiest woman alive, plays a strung-out addict here. She has huge bags painted under her eyes, fake acne splotched on her skin, and lost twenty pounds too. And Kunis desperately wants to impress us. She delivers a tear-strewn, impassioned monologue about the addict's mindset in front of a classroom. She begs her mother for clean piss, in the movie's silliest moment. She shares many intense arguments with Glen Close. It's the type of acting that is very aware of how serious it is, as if every scene is an Oscar clip in the making.

Kunis is a good actor but she's chained to the melodrama here, creating a character that feels more like an exaggerated shadow of a human being then a fully realized person. Glenn Close is a better actress than Kunis, though certainly one that has received attention from the Academy for grotesque overacting in recent years. In the first half of “Four Good Days,” I felt Close was almost giving a decent performance. You can tell Deb loves her daughter but has also learned to be suspicious of her. During her best moments, you can see this conflict in Close's eyes. Yet, eventually, the script has Close scream at people in an overwrought fashion. She rescues her daughter from a crack house. She picks a fight with her understanding boyfriend and her agitated ex-husband. She screams at a beleaguered waiting room receptionist. Every ounce of subtly is squeezed out by histrionics like this. 

The whole movie is like that. Anytime I was almost feeling myself sucked in, my attention was derailed by melodramatics. Let's talk about that crack house scene some more. Close descends into a hellish squalor, surrounded by every horror you associate with a place like this: A passed-out junkie, some people fucking, a teenager shooting up, and a scary black man. That moment triggers a really disappointing shift in the movie, when characters you sort of liked before begin acting in unbelievably stupid ways. Close's Deb is, earlier in the film, so worried about Molly that she can't even enjoy dinner with her other, less dysfunctional daughter. Later, Deb allows Molly to walk out of her house. Of course, this is when Molly relapses. We know she's going to, because this is a drug movie. And because the doctor said she can't take the shot with drugs in her system. So if she didn't fall off the wagon, this cliched movie would be robbed of its cliched health crisis climax. There's an obvious visual metaphor too, in the form of a jigsaw puzzle mother and daughter work on together as they mend their relationship.  

“Four Good Days” is as hooked on Oscar bait formula as its protagonist is hooked on heroin. Naturally, the movie is based on a true story. As for Warren's song, “Somehow You Do,” it's as overwrought as the movie that birthed it. Reba McEntire sings it, and she's a wonderful performer, but her instincts mislead her here. She croaks and grumbles Warren's mediocre lyrics against a trudging country music melody. But I'm thankful that was the only category an overcooked piece of ham like “Four Good Days” manage to impress the Academy in. This is the thirteenth time Diane Warren has been nominated and I'm kind of hoping they just give her the fucking Oscar this time. That way I'll never have to watch another mediocre movie just because she contributed some generic, faux-inspirational ballad to it. At least the movie is fairly short, as far as Oscar hopefuls go, running under two hours. [5/10]