Nurse Betty
Don’t Be Cruel
I saw Nurse Betty on a Friday night at a larger-than-usual multiplex in suburban Houston with a smaller-than-usual parking lot. I ended up parking behind the building, and got my first surprise of the evening when I rounded the corner and headed towards the ticket window. There were teenagers everywhere, it was like we’d been invaded by Planet 90210. There, right in front of me, in droves, was the audience for all of the bad, dismal, mindless movies of the summer of 2000, lined up to shell out cash for God-knows-what horrible movies.
It is tempting, then, to give Nurse Betty a pass, if for no other reason that the fact that it dares to be a grown-up movie in a summer jam-packed with juvenile entertainment. It’s got a sly sense of humor and a needle-sharp sense of satire, along with two of the biggest laughs of the summer. However, Nurse Betty works at cross purposes. It is a sweet, happy-ending comedy with a thinly-disguised mean streak, and it has a seemingly original screenplay that ends up seeking to redefine the word “derivative”.
And it also has Texas actress Renee “You had me at hello” Zellweger, who must carry a movie by herself for the first time. Zellweger plays Betty Sizemore, who works behind the counter at the Tip-Top Cafe in Fair Oaks, Kansas. We learn three things about Betty: she’s a real sweetie-pie; she’s married to a no-good louse (Aaron Eckhart); and she’s a fan of the soap opera “A Reason To Love” — so much so that she’s mastered the art of pouring coffee while giving her full attention to the TV screen. When her husband is killed right before her eyes, however, the latter element takes over her personality. Betty’s post-traumatic stress manifests itself in a conviction that she is a character in her soap opera, and she takes off for Hollywood to find the man she believes to be her lost love.
That’s the original story, sort of, if you don’t count the backhanded Wizard of Oz references. The derivative story is the story of the killers, played by Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman. It’s depressing, in a way. You have America’s Finest Actor and one of its funniest comedians playing hitmen in a dark comedy, and all that Nurse Betty’s screenplay has to offer them is some warmed-over Quentin Tarantino dialogue. Actually, what’s really depressing is that Tarantino, apparently, doesn’t have anything on the front burner except acting in the next Adam Sandler movie. The good news is that Freeman is making another Alex Cross movie. (Note: I wrote this before Along Came A Spider was released; Freeman’s performance was anything but “good news”. Bleah.)
Freeman and Rock torture and kill Eckhart, who has stolen something of value to them and hidden it in the trunk of a Buick LeSabre. (We find out, later in the movie, that the mysterious object in the trunk is ten kilograms of drugs and not a briefcase with an eerie golden glow or something like that.) The Buick, however, is being driven by Betty to Southern California, and so we have a road movie and a chase movie.
If Freeman’s side of the story is a Quentin Tarantino movie, Zellweger’s experiences in California play like a John Waters movie. (I came this close to titling the review “Reservoir Flamingos”.) Nurse Betty is deranged, of course, but in a cheerful way that no one has quite managed since Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom. She arrives at a Los Angeles county hospital, confidently asking the personnel department where she can find “Dr. David Ravel”. “Of course, he’s only here two days a week,” she tells a bewildered nurse, who can’t find any record of the famous, compassionate heart surgeon anywhere.
This is where the movie’s mean streak begins to manifest itself. The script has to find Betty a job, a place to live, and a sympathetic friend right at this point, and contrives to do so in a particularly cruel, pointless way. The sympathetic friend (Tia Texada, who has the kind of role Marisa Tomei had before she won that Oscar) finds out that the object of Betty’s affection is a soap-opera star, and tries to play a mean trick on her in public. (It backfires, of course, and the expression on Texada’s face creates one of the movie’s genuine laughs.)
This places Betty in the path of soap opera actor George McCord, who is played by Greg Kinnear, Hollywood’s foremost non-actor. Kinnear is at his best when he has a part that lets him play to his strengths, and the charming, insincere, and shallow George is right up his alley. George is so insincere, in fact, that he assumes that the completely sincere Betty is insincerely engaging in an audition when she declares her love for him… which turns out to be a horribly, though indirectly, cruel thing to do.
The script is also cruel to the pair of hitmen. First, it requires Chris Rock to be restrained most of the time (although he has an outburst towards the end of the movie that provides the other genuine laugh). Second, it requires Morgan Freeman to stumble through the second half of the movie all moony-eyed over Nurse Betty. R. Ebert tells us that this is the key to the movie, that it’s a parallel shared fantasy between Freeman’s character and Zellweger’s character. Zellweger, however, at least has the excuse of post-traumatic stress disorder; there’s no reason for Freeman to go all loopy and weird. But he does, and it’s painful to watch.
Nurse Betty is nobody’s idea of a feel-good movie, and it’s not really funny enough to qualify as a dark comedy. (The one really funny performance is Eckhardt’s, though I doubt if he could have carried it off through the whole movie had he been spared.) However, it’s an intelligent, grown-up movie that challenges the audience and has some really good performances. In a summer like this, you take what you can get.