`Shower’ sprinkled with truths > Bullock solid, but Thomas’ ’28 Days’ is a predictable, light melodramedy

SHOWER, directed by Zhang Yang, written by Liu Fen Dou, Yang, Huo Xin, Diao Yi Nan and Cai Xiang Jun. In Chinese with English subtitles. 92 minutes. PG-13. Now playing, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

In the fun, energetic opening moments of Zhang Yang’s “Shower,” a well-dressed Chinese businessman cuts through the busy streets of downtown Beijing, enters what seems to be a futuristic port-a-potty, and begins to disrobe to the driving beat of an industrial score.

He’s been here before. Casually going through the motions of undressing, he steps naked and unfazed into a shimmering stainless steel chamber, which quickly envelopes him in a soapy mist and begins the efficient, mechanized work of scrubbing his body with giant rollers that resemble the cloth brushes found in car washes.

In minutes, he’s rinsed, blown dry and perfumed, and has left the public shower to resume his busy life in modern China, a place that – in this film – has more to do with Chaplin’s “Modern Times” than it does with the old ways and traditions that once drove its culture.

At its core, “Shower” is a film about those traditions. It’s at odds with where China has been and where it’s going.

It follows Da Ming (Pu Cun Xin), a wealthy Chinese businessman who represents China’s modern life.

Handsome and slick, icy and driven, he’s a man who would have been more than happy to ignore his working-class roots if a postcard from his retarded brother, Er Ming (Jiang Wu), hadn’t arrived suggesting their father, Master Liu (Zhu Xu), was dead.

Doing the right thing, Da Ming takes to the air and arrives at his father’s bathhouse – only to find his father alive but the family business threatened by urban renewal.

Filled with mixed emotions and a sudden sense of responsibility to a family he once rejected, Da Ming reluctantly dips into the slower-paced world of the bathhouse. Yang brings that world to life through the rich, quirky characters who share their secrets and their life stories in a tranquil world of steam.

“Shower” is being billed as a comedy, but, in spite of some light moments, it’s no comedy. It’s a serious, often somber drama layered with the passing of a time and the death of a way of life.

The pace is deliberately slow – sometimes too slow – but the film comes to life in its relationships, particularly in the bond shared between Master Liu and Er Ming, who teach Da Ming a few things about himself that resonate with a universal truth.

Grade: B+

28 DAYS, directed by Betty Thomas, written by Susannah Grant. 103 minutes. PG-13.

Betty Thomas’ melodramedy, “28 Days,” isn’t for anyone who has undergone treatment for addiction; those people will smell a rat within moments of this film’s wild, freewheeling, heavy-drinking start.

The film is for those who want to see Sandra Bullock “cute” her way through another movie, those who are willing to forgive poor Sandy for looking adorable while she barfs into a toilet, falls out of a tree while in search of drugs, or slams a stretch limousine into the front of someone’s house after making a spectacular, drunken fool of herself at her sister’s wedding.

This isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just terribly light. It’s unsure what to do with its material and it certainly doesn’t trust the audience to handle it, so it consistently makes trade-offs. It’s as if Susannah Grant, the screenwriter, said this: “If Sandy is going to projectile vomit and have a vicious case of the shakes when she comes off her addiction to booze and pills, then we’d better counter those icky moments with some pretty sharp comedy – like having her interact with a swishy gay German struggling with a speech impediment!”

To the film’s credit, the comedy sometimes works, but in a film that considers getting split ends as hitting rock-bottom, who can take any of this seriously when Thomas decides to turn it all into a full-blown melodrama?

Bullock does her best to cross that line, but she’s constantly being undermined by a bunch of 12-step caricatures. The caricatures include a combative doctor, a heroin-addicted Goth-girl, a sensitive, lumbering, sex-addicted jock – whose presence makes it nearly impossible for the actress to transcend her bargain-basement Julia Roberts-appeal and fully become her character, Gwen Cummings.

Peter Cohn’s “Drunks” did all this much better. That film respected the addiction it showcased while also managing to find humor within the addiction. “Drunks” drew audiences in because it was clear it never wanted to make a buck off alcoholism; it was smarter and more courageous than that.

Not “28 Days.” This cold turkey of a movie is so mechanized by formula, whatever it was trying to accomplish has been lost to a whitewashed predictability.

Grade: C-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the Bangor Daily News, and Tuesday and Thursday on “NEWS CENTER at 5:30” and “NEWS CENTER at 11” on WLBZ 2.