Four Good Days, Glenn Close-Mila Kunis Fail To Bring This Mother-Daughter Drug Addiction Drama Alive

Four Good Days

Starring  Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and Stephen Root.

Directed by  Rodrigo Garcia

Rating: **

 I  so wanted to love this film. A  mother-daughter trauma  drama  about the daughter  fighting off drug addiction. Scenes  from  the 1990 Shirley  MacLaine -Meryl Streep  drama  Postcards  From The Edge where Streep played  an alcoholic in  a troubled relationship  with her formidable  mother, played in  my mind as I  tried to  plunge myself into this new avatar  of the age-old  parent-child  melodrama.

Four Good Days  is  100 trite  minutes of diatribe and discourse  and  disheveled drama on drug addiction. Forget Postcards From The Edge, not one  moment of the drama seemed genuine here. The emotions flow in  a stream  of  stiffened  formulistic consciousness. Mom  is  ruthless. Daughter  is Penitent.  Mom softens. Daughter Betrays…and so on and so forth.

 It’s not  as  though the  director doesn’t try to infuse  emotional  energy into the central. The truth is,  he tries  too hard to  make the drama  real and raw. But the  end-result is  the raw realism  of  Bigg Boss where every  “real” situation is staged.

The  film , blessedly short, starts with  Molly (Mila  Kunis) showing  up at her mother and stepfather’s door shivering and  blabbering. Mom  Deb(Glenn Glose)  shuts the  door on her  homeless daughter’s face. I wonder  if any mother would do that in real  life.  But  hey,this is  based  on true incidents. So who am I to question the mother’s coldhearted obduracy?

 As  the drama drags  its  faltering  feet I felt  the  pressure of  the  director to re-construct true incidents. I feel this exercise in selfconscious  creation has considerably stilted  director Rodrigo Garcia’s  storytelling propensity. He  acts  like a schoolboy forced  into a  tuxedo  two sizes  too small for him to attend a  PTA meeting.

The  mood is  tense, and not in a good way. We always looked at Glenn Close as  the fleamarket  version of Meryl Streep . She did come  into her own eventually.And she was lauded  for her recent performance  in The Wife. Here she is  splashing in shallow murky waters  trying to understand this  tormented mother who can’t forgive her daughter  or herself for  the former’s  drug addiction,

Mila Kunis  as  the junkie  daughter is  more at home.  Comfortable  with  the  simplifications  in  the plot that enable the drug drama  to  hyphenate the  haze with a sighing candour. The mix of  myth and  authenticity is just too  underpowering. Four Good Days  is  specially disappointing.  You expect  so much .All  you get is  noises of pain, never get to feel the real  thing.