Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Nurse Betty

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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An attempt to reach beyond Hollywood mush outstrips Nurse Betty's director

by Chris Neal

Betty always dreamed of being a nurse, a dream that has come to naught in her small Kansas hometown—trapped as she is in subservience to her mulleted, despicable husband Del and her dead-end job as a waitress. Hitman Charlie has his own dreams—he longs for a placid, nonviolent life of peace, and, eventually, for Betty.

The surprising way in which these two stargazers' paths parallel and intertwine is the best thing Nurse Betty has going for it. It's the first produced script for writers John Richards and James Flamberg (who took the best screenplay award at Cannes for their trouble), and the first time director Neil LaBute has shot from someone else's script. He perhaps should have chosen something a little closer to the corrosive milieu of his original work (In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors), judging from the occasional train wreck between his harsh, no-frills style and Nurse Betty's often-whimsical sentiment.

The story is set in motion when Betty (Renee Zellweger) becomes a secret witness to the drug-related killing of her hissably sleazy husband (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) by the contemplative Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and his hotheaded protégé Wesley (Chris Rock). Witnessing the killing shocks Betty into a dissociative state—she suddenly believes herself to be the former fiancé of the main character on her favorite soap opera, A Reason to Love, and sets out for Los Angeles to hook up with him again. (USA Films has devised a wickedly funny spoof website for the fictional series, at www. areasontolove.com).

Nurse Betty shifts into road-movie mode when the killers, convinced that Betty has purposely absconded with the trunk full of heroin they've been hired to deliver, set about tracking her across the country. When Betty arrives in L.A. and meets the actor who portrays her dream doctor (himself played by Greg Kinnear), her unblinking delusion is mistaken for method acting, leading her into the inner circle of the show.

In the meantime, as he pursues Betty through Texas, Nevada and finally California, Charlie begins to project his dreams of innocence and grace onto his prey—to idealize her just as she has idealized the fantasy world of the soap opera. Both of them are delusional, but only one of them has an excuse—Betty doesn't know any better; Charlie should, but refuses to see the truth of his situation.

Nurse Betty piles on elements of romantic comedy, crime thriller, and road movie, and these varied facets often step on each other's toes. This especially becomes a problem during the film's climax, when the gravity of the plot is blunted by the jokiness of the dialogue and cartoonishness of the small-town characters who have also pursued Betty to L.A. LaBute, blessed neither with the deft pacing to keep this story humming nor the visual sense to distract you when it isn't, is simply not the man to juggle all these balls.

Luckily, he is bailed out left and right by his extraordinary cast. Zellweger has been adrift since her star turn in Jerry Maguire, but Nurse Betty should by all rights put her back on track. She plays Betty's helplessness at the beginning of the movie without ever overtly begging for sympathy, and as the character progresses into fantasy, she never tips her hand. When Betty's illusion is inevitably shattered, the way Zellweger plays her dawning realization is heartbreaking.

Freeman, as the movie's other main pole, is just as invaluable. In a role saddled with cliché—the career criminal doing just one more job before retirement to a tropical island—he employs shadings of tone that suggest a rich inner life and the way in which Charlie's dreams have been ravaged by time and circumstance, just as Betty's have. He is well paired with Rock, who finally registers (for the first time since New Jack City) as an actual character, rather than as a version of his stand-up persona.

Kinnear, too, fleshes out a role—the smug, conceited actor—that could have degenerated into cliché. When he figures out who Betty really is, Kinnear shows us first the insecurity which has made his character a jackass—and then the long-absent humanity flooding back to his face. Watching Kinnear here, it's almost inconceivable that he once hosted Talk Soup.

Unfortunately, all the actors' efforts can't force Nurse Betty to gel. LaBute occasionally gives us a transcendent moment, as when Charlie imagines himself romancing Betty by the Grand Canyon, but seems at a loss as to which tone to take. LaBute finally seems to throw up his hands when he gets to the tidy happy ending, which may forever sully his reputation as a cynic. It's just the kind of formulaically sunny Hollywood mush that, by then, even Betty has abandoned.