Nurse Betty (2000)

Nurse Betty (2000): Dir: Neil LaBute / Cast: Renee Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear, Aaron Eckhart: Very unique black comedy about fixation or excessive imagination resulting from being desensitized. Renee Zellweger plays Betty Sizemore who works at a diner and obsesses over a soap opera called A Reason to Love. She believes that soap star David Revell speaks directly at her. After her husband is savagely scalped to death, due to a situation involving stolen drugs, Betty gleefully sets out to meet the man of her dreams. Too disturbing for laughs but interesting and detailed. Director Neil LaBute presents the fantasy dysfunctional elements mixed with warped reality. Zellweger is radiant poising as a nurse believing a false lifestyle. When she finally does snapped back into reality, the film makes some interesting implications especially with Betty. Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock are excellent as her husband's killers out to find drugs hidden in the trunk of her car, unknown to her. Freeman draws laughs through a sudden infatuation with her, while Rock is violent and excessive. With that said, the violence presented is too graphic for the film's tone. Greg Kinnear plays Revell who sees Betty as an act until the tables are turned. Aaron Eckhart plays Betty's husband who gets in too deep with our two assassins. Bizarre portrait of reality and fantasy collision. Score: 9 / 10

In 2009, we had a film released with Sandra Bullock called All about Steve. It was one of the worst films of the year. In 2000, we had a film released with Renee Zellweger called Nurse Betty. Now I love Sandra Bullock a lot more than Renee Zellweger. At first, I started off hating Nurse Betty, but as I continued, though it annoyed me, I was interested.There are many things that I didn't like about it. Zellweger's character is delusional and at times pretty stupid. Her husband is murdered, she witnesses it, and then goes back to watching her soap opera.Another character that I hated was Chris Rock's character. I have never been a fan of Chris Rock. Sure he has had a couple of good films but here he really is annoying. There was one scene involving him that changed my opinion a little.Nurse Betty is about a waitress named Betty(played well by Renee Zellweger), a woman who is a huge fan of a soap opera and is in love with the lead character David(played by Greg Kinnear). In a rather disturbing scene, Betty's husband(played by Aaron Eckhart, who is having an affair)is scalped and shot by a couple of hit men(played by Chris Rock and Morgan Freeman). Betty witnesses the murder, but she isn't upset by it. So she travels to California to see David. She's not in love with the actor, but the character. And when she gets there, she always refers to him as David.These hit men search for Betty and travel down to Calfornia to find her. Freeman's character falls for her. While the annoying son just complains all the time. And once Betty starts to know David, she starts to realize he's an asshole and that she's crazy.In short, this is the more original version of All about Steve. The better one too. Nurse Betty has it's moments of hilarity and it's moments of stupidity. I like Renee Zellweger and here we have a great cast. But the movie ain't that great. It's entertaining, funny, and other things. But it's also very strange. and like what I said about All about Steve, there is nothing funny about a crazy person. This movie is actually funny though. I can't call it great. though flawed, Nurse Betty works in it's own way.Nurse Betty: B-

Minor spoilers follow, but nothing you won't have learned from reading the back of the DVD.Held together by a wonderful central performance from Renée Zellweger, Nurse Betty is a dark yet deceptively good-natured comedy.Suffering from an emotional and mental breakdown after witnessing her sleazy husband's murder, already-troubled and desperately unhappy waitress Betty becomes convinced a character on her favourite daytime soap is her long-lost fiancé and sets off from Kansas to Hollywood to find him.Instead of making jokes at the expense of Betty's mental state, writer John C. Richards is very sympathetic, with Zellweger portraying her as a lost innocent, not entirely helpless but tragically vulnerable nonetheless. Crucially she's never really a victim despite this and while she undoubtedly suffers horribly the motives of the characters who treat her poorly are all understandable - even Greg Kinnear as the object of her deluded affections may be an egotistical, blinkered, arrogant pig but he genuinely believes that she's merely a quirky wannabe actress with bags of talent rather than an insane stalker.The farcical ending where all the main protagonists descend on the same place (in this instance Betty's house) at the same time to have it out is as old as cinema itself but it works quite well here, even if the shift in tone is unfortunate.Zellweger is ably supported by Kinnear and Morgan Freeman both doing solid work, and it's especially pleasing to see Chris Rock show restraint in his earlier scenes.Not nearly as cruel as you might expect, and not at all mean-spirited, Nurse Betty - while far from being a laugh riot - is a solid entertainment elevated to something considerably more by the lead actress.

I suppose when one views Nurse Betty, one should be rather sceptical over whether or not one believes if these events or if these sorts of people could actually exist. The film is not of a large scale nature, it doesn't rely on gimmicks or special effects to get across the world in which it is set and nor does it ever want to get across an impression like that. In fact if anything, everything is shot very much on ground level and kept very simplistic on a visual and storytelling level. So why is it the film threatens to creep into a realm of the un-real when it has its protagonist and character of the title Betty (Zellweger) come across as an outgoing and perhaps overly confident woman and yet has her retain certain qualities that would see her in the real world carted off to an asylum? The joke Nurse Betty has flowing through it throughout is that small town girl, partner of a used car salesman, diner waitress Betty thinks that a fictional television series programme revolving around a hospital melodrama is actually real. The characters and the situations and events that transpire in their fictional lives are soaked up by Betty, whose relationship with her partner played by Aaron Eckhart does not seem so disconnected that she comes home each day and locks herself away, eating her way through hours and hours of episodes; soaking up everything and believing it's real. But that's what she does; her relationships with real people around her seem healthy: she talks and discusses things with her partner Del Sizemore in a friendly manner over dinner; such things like if ten pin bowling should be an Olympic sport.He cheats on her at work and comes across as someone relatively unkind but there is no domestic problem – would a violent domestic episode aided in prolonging Betty's wish to escape her life and hide amongst a fictional televised one? I think so. Additionally, Betty comes across as a cheery and outgoing girl at work and knows people in the neighbourhood; it seems she has some sort of network, indeed some sort of life given a friend she was due to go to a concert of some sort with a friend the night the initial incident occurs.Yet Betty gets so involved and we are supposed to believe that she genuinely thinks this television serial is real that it's all too much for her. The film carries a gritty and realistic of sorts feel but I just didn't feel that Betty could ever be as crazy as she is. Indeed, a better set up involving darker and nastier themes and incidences would've worked better in persuading me. Have her partner hit her; establish she has no friends and then make the television programme the only bright spot in her existence as she comes home; evades her husband and locks herself away, pouring over all these tapes and episodes.So the film is really a study of how individuals can get obsessed over certain texts. Betty is so obsessed with the show, she thinks it's real and goes to hunt the cast down with the other equilibrium revolving around Charlie (Freeman) and his gradual obsession over Betty herself through another type of text, a photograph of someone he's never met but must track down due to her oblivious owning of criminal related goods. Again, it's cute and somewhat funny in a surreal way but do we ever believe it? If not, can we really enjoy the events that are transpiring if the film does not 'feel' as if it is adopting an aesthetic of escapism? Like I said, Betty is in ownership of things she does not know of and the film is a tale of two men, Charlie and Wesley (Rock), attempting to track it/her down. The character study actually works pretty well. The buddy combination of Rock and Freeman works thanks to good dialogue for Rock's character and his loud mouth routine fits the often inane ramblings of a young gangster desperate to get the job done. Betty comes across as a somewhat independent woman in a backwater world dominated by men and we get the feeling that while she may not be a feminist of sorts, she makes her own decisions and if crossing the country looking for someone who doesn't really exist is what she must do, then away she goes.But the drag for Nurse Betty is its middle chapter with the final third coming off the rails completely in the sense it all boils down to odd events in one location with all the characters coming together. But we don't really care, because by then we want a bit of stupidity following the iffy second sector when it's established Betty is right on that brink between crazy and 'special' (if you know what I mean). The film juxtaposes its laughs with fake, cheesy soap scenes and scalpings as well as binary opposing its assassins: old/young; healthy/dietless; experienced/newbie. The film feels like Last Action Hero only without the golden ticket as we watch a film about someone who thinks another piece of visual text is true. While not particularly great, Nurse Betty evokes the odd laugh and is a minor pleasure merely for the sheer bizarreness of it all.