Fantasy Refuge
FILM: Nurse Betty
DIRECTOR: Neil LaBute
STARRING: Renee Zellweger, Morgan Freeman
GRADE: B+
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CARRYING A TORCH: BETTY SIZEMORE (RENEE SIZEMORE) WANTS MORE THAN A CUT-OUT
RELATIONSHIP WITH A SOAP-OPERA DOCTOR IN NURSE BETTY.
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How miserable is Betty Sizemore's life? So miserable that about her only
pleasure is watching a soap opera live at work all the while taping it on her
VCR so she can watch it over again "more carefully" at night. Betty is a diner
waitress who masks her melancholy with a hiccupy smile of good cheer. She's the
kind of emotionally battered person who has crawled down inside herself, made
herself small so as to be a more difficult target to hurt. Her co-workers at
the diner like her, or they take pity on her, anyway. But she isn't really
close to any of them.
For her birthday, they give her a life-size cardboard cutout of her
favorite soap star, and a cupcake with a single candle. Betty Sizemore's life
is so miserable that her good-for-nothing philandering rat of a husband expects
her to find a girlfriend to celebrate with and when she's not looking takes a
huge wet chomp out her cupcake without otherwise recognizing her birthday. So
begins Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty, a comedy longer on heart and winning
laughs than on narrative precision.
Betty Sizemore (Renee Zellweger) is a sad sack. Her car-salesman
husband Del (Aaron Eckhart) has sex with his secretary in his office while
talking to Betty on the phone, and Betty's idea of an extra-fun time is getting
to use a Buick for the evening instead of some smaller car. Betty is a
practiced escapist, blithely ignoring her husband's indiscretions, intoxicating
herself with the organ-music romance of A Reason to Love, a typically
hospital-based daytime drama. And then Betty's life gets so bad she has to go
to Lala Land literally as well as figuratively.
Del, it seems, hasn't been selling as many cars as he ought, and
has decided to branch out into drugs. Well, that brings him into the gun
sights of Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock) a couple of Motown
hitmen. Controlled, proudly professional and speculatively philosophical,
Charlie will remind viewers of Samuel L. Jackson's character from Pulp
Fiction. Wesley, meanwhile, possesses Chris Rock's trademark attitude
without Chris Rock's own A stand-up material.
Charlie and Wesley make contact with Del and accompany him home
where Betty is watching a tape of A Reason to Love with the volume
turned so low that no one realizes she's there. What follows is
so violent it had to be re-edited to keep the picture from being saddled
with a box-office crushing NC-17 rating.
Trying to find Del's drug stash, Charlie and Wesley tie him up,
beat him, scalp him and ultimately kill him. The scene is horrific without
making much sense on several levels. What's with the scalping? Aside from
providing a cinematic moment you definitely wish it wouldn't, this act of
brutality would seem out of character for these two particular professional
murderers. Moreover, the murder sequence develops without a clear set of
objectives. Would Charlie and Wesley be satisfied if Del gave them either the
drugs or money to pay for them? Even less clear is why Del gives up his life
rather than the location of his stash. He's not protecting anybody. And he's
certainly not the sort of tough guy who, Sylvester or Ahnuld-style, dares the
villain to do his worst.
The film's main plot engine roars to life as Betty watches through
a door crack while her husband is butchered. She then falls into a
perambulating state of shock that takes the movie to a lighter and better
place. Cramming the reality of Del's murder into a dark closet of her mind,
Betty suddenly melds fractured details of her real life with the gauzy details
of her fantasy life and determines first that the characters on A Reason to
Love are real and second that she's one of them. Forgetting the killing,
she thinks her husband is still alive and that she and Del have sadly "grown
apart." Furthermore, she recalls a high school fling she had with soap
protagonist Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear) and decides to abandon her bad
marriage and journey to Los Angeles to rekindle their relationship.
Conveniently, Betty imagines herself having completed nursing school rather
than the day shift at the diner.
In L.A., realizing her dreams is as easy as daring to risk having
them. Meeting her beau is as simple as putting on an evening gown and showing
up at the charity function where he's sure to be in attendance. The scene in
which Betty approaches TV actor George McCord (Kinnear) and reminds his Dr.
Ravell character of their love affair develops a delicious lunacy as George
thinks Betty is staging a guerilla audition for a spot in his soap cast.
Like so much in this movie, though, the filmmakers don't know when to quit.
Betty is out of her gourd, of course, but she's sincere. That George
would put up with what he thinks is her marathon "audition" for several
days in a row doesn't wash any better than grandma's corroded scrub board.
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BEGGING TO DIFFER: CHARLIE (MORGAN FREEMAN) WORKS IT OUT WITH FELLOW HITMAN
WESLEY (CHRIS ROCK) IN NEIL LABUTE'S NURSE BETTY.
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The drug pursuit angle to this flick doesn't hold together all that
well either. The car Betty drives to the Coast is the very one in which Del had
hidden his drugs. And that means Charlie and Wesley are shortly on Betty's
tail. The script doesn't even bother to try convincing you that they could
actually trace her movements. And the decision to have Charlie wander into a
romantic fantasy of his own succeeds largely in turning his character inside
out. That renders the climax a psychological mess because we really haven't a
clue about the thought processes of anybody. With people tied up anew and guns
ultimately blazing, we are even handed a revelation about the relationship of
two of the characters that lands on our plate like a belated entree served well
after dessert. It may be tasty, but it's way too late to digest.
Nurse Betty is a striking departure for director LaBute, who
wrote his own first two features, In the Company of Men and Your
Friends and Neighbors, both of which displayed a deep cynicism about the
human condition. Working here from a script by John C. Richards and James
Flamberg, LaBute seems hoping to capture a larger audience by sailing into the
land of Tarantino excess. Whereas LaBute's own admirably tight scripts were
black and mean while adroitly remaining nonetheless humane, Nurse Betty
is cavalierly sloppy and shamelessly sentimental. The contrivance by which
Betty comes to be the roommate of an Hispanic Angelino named Rosa (Tia Texada)
is only less crude than the manner in which this character is thereafter
shunted to the story's sidelines.
All this said, Nurse Betty manages something appalling
that few films have accomplished in the last half year: It manages to be
entertaining. The actors all deliver. Zellweger's all-American appeal is in top
form. She's got great eyes and lovely lips but manages to be ordinarily
attractive instead of movie-star glamorous. Freeman, meanwhile, takes a
character that seems to change from scene to scene and infuses him with such
dignity that Charlie almost works despite the jumpy writing. Rock has such
innate personal sass and such great comedic timing, he gets laughs out of
lines that lesser performers might turn into groans. And, of course, nobody
does smarm any better than Kinnear, who has proved he can't carry a movie on
his own but, cast right as he is here, can make a notable contribution in
support. Best of all, the wonderful Allison Janney shows up as Lyla Branch,
the writer/producer of A Reason to Love, and illustrates injust two
scenes why George Huang
titled his look at Hollywood Swimming With
Sharks.
Nurse Betty is a long way from top-drawer cinema, and in
another, better movie year would no doubt be largely overlooked and quickly
forgotten. Previous pictures have probed issues of character and actor, fantasy
and reality to much more enduring effect. Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of
Cairo is one superior example, as is Karel Reisz's vastly different
The French Lieutenant's Woman. Things have come to such a sorry
pass, however, that this film is just about the best thing out there right
now. It may not work, but at least you're genuinely happy to have seen
it. How often has that been true of Hollywood fare lately?
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