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That’s the way it goes. After a summer that saw a greater drought in Hollywood than in the Sahara, we get in one weekend a couple movies respectively featuring the coolest actress and actor currently working.
Making up for a role that was mostly set dressing in Me, Myself, & Irene, Renée Zellweger gets a better opportunity to flex her seriocomic chops in this curiously fashioned absurdity from director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors). She plays Betty Sizemore, a smalltown Kansas waitress driven by alienation from her scheming, adulterous used-car husband (Aaron Eckhart) to find solace in the hospital soap opera “A Reason to Live.” When she witnesses his bloody execution by a couple bickering assassins (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) seeking stolen heroin, the shock sends her retreating into the world of her favorite show.
Off she drives to L.A. to woo her TV idol (Greg Kinnear), thinking him to be the sympathetic real-world heart surgeon of her delusion. The quest leads to a series of Gump-like encounters that not only encourage her behavior but eventually insinuate her onto “Reason” itself. Meanwhile the killers are on a cross-country mission of their own to track her down, only Betty is having some strange effects on them too, even in absentia.
This all works wonderfully, thanks mostly to a near-miraculous performance by Zellweger; her natural ingenuousness works perfectly for such a disarming character. In fact, all the characters are marked by inspired casting (look for ever-dependable Allison Janney and 80s bad-boy Crispin Glover in supporting roles). Freeman’s rare foray into villainy gives him the opportunity to play both vicious and thoughtfully intuitive against the compulsive antics of Rock, who despite scalping Betty’s husband is still more understated than in anything else he’s done to date.
Which brings us back to the striking geometry crafted by LaBute and first-time writers John Richards and James Flanberg. Unlike something by, say, the Coen brothers, Nurse Betty isn’t the typical dark comedy, continually inspiring both laughter and grimace. We spend most of the time enthralled by Betty’s goofy Hollywood adventure, yet pockets of incongruous brutality spring up in her wake. One moment it’s sweet scrunchy-faced smiles, the next somebody’s getting bludgeoned at a diner in Arizona. It’s almost like two different movies have been edited into one. I can see where you’d be inclined to doubt that it all comes together just great, so don’t take my word for it alone. The show I saw had a largely 60-ish audience (that probably didn’t know Chris Rock from Rock City), probably because the film has been advertised as a screwball comedy and Freeman has a strong following among the AARP crowd. They recoiled from the mayhem, but none of them walked, and they could be heard to giggle heartily throughout and express their enjoyment afterwards
Did I mention that Renée Zellweger looks awfully appealing in a nurse’s uniform? B+
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