Nurse Betty

Neil LaBute’s 2000 “Nurse Betty” is about two dreamers in love with their fantasies. One is a Kansas housewife. The other is a professional criminal. The housewife is in love with a doctor on a television soap opera. The criminal is in love with the housewife, whose husband he has killed. What is important is that both of these obsessed romantics are not known to the person they are in love with.

Morgan Freeman is Charlie, the killer, and Renee Zellweger is Betty, the housewife and waitress. Their lives meet because Del, played by Aaron Eckhart, Betty’s worthless husband, tries to con Charlie on a drug deal. Charlie and Wesley, played by Chris Rock, show up at his house, threaten him, scalp him, and kill him. Charlie only kills him because Wesley scalps him – and then what are you going to do? Betty witnesses the murder but erases it from her memory. Her husband was a rat, she doesn’t miss him, and in her mind, his death frees her to drive out of Los Angeles to meet her “ex-fiancé,” a doctor on a soap opera. Charlie and Wesley follow her, and in the course of their search, Charlie’s mind also goes off the rails. Under the influence of Betty’s sweet smile in a photograph, he begins to idealize her – he speaks of her “grace” – and to see her as the bright angel of his lonely self.

In Los Angeles, Betty meets George, played by Greg Kinnear, the actor who plays the doctor. She relates only to the character, and as she talks to “Dr. David Ravell” at a charity benefit, George and his friends think they’re witnessing a great Method audition. Meanwhile, Charlie and Wesley arrive in Los Angeles with Charlie increasingly fascinated by everything about Betty. When they started chasing her, she was an eyewitness to a murder who was driving a car in which her husband had hidden their drugs. Now Charlie thinks of her more as a person who would sympathize with his broken self.

Roger Ebert said in his review, “I'm spending so much time on the plot of "Nurse Betty" because I think it's possible to misread. When the film premiered at Cannes in May, some reviews didn't seem to understand that Betty and Charlie are parallel characters, both projecting their dreams on figures they've created in their own fantasies. Look at this movie inattentively, especially if you're looking for Hollywood formulas, and all you see is a mad woman pursued by some drug dealers, like a high-rent "Crazy in Alabama." But it's more, deeper, and more touching than that. Zellweger plays Betty as an impossibly sweet, earnest, sincere, lovable, vulnerable woman--"a Doris Day type," as Charlie describes her. She has unwisely married Del, a vulgar louse who orders her around and eats her birthday cupcake. Her consolation is the daily soap opera about her fantasy lover Dr. Ravell. When Charlie and Wesley turn up, nobody knows she's home. She glimpses the murder from the next room, and her response is to hit the rewind button for a crucial soap opera scene she's missed.” A therapist tells the local sheriff, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, that she remembers nothing. She’s in an “altered state – that allows a traumatized person to keep on functioning.” Betty drives west in the dangerous Buick LeSabre with the drugs in the trunk, and outside a roadside bar, she has a fantasy where Dr. Ravell proposes to her. Not long after, following right behind her, Charlie pauses in the moonlight on the edge of the Grand Canyon and dreams of dancing with Betty. Charlie has never met Betty, and Betty has never met the “doctor.” Ebert noted, “Both of their dream-figures are projections of their own needs and idealism.”

Note about the Grand Canyon scene: Morgan Freeman admitted it was a really cold night when they shot that. He admitted that Renee Zellweger wasn’t wearing any clothes except for what was fantasized about in that segment. Morgan Freeman said he warmed Zellweger up as best as he could and that part marked his first kissing scene. Chris Rock, who lost his father very young, said that he had father figures, but says Freeman was like his uncle.

Morgan Freeman has a complicated role. His Charlie is a dangerous villain, capable of killing but looking forward to retirement in Florida after one last “assignment.” He has a strong bond with Wesley, a hothead, and tries to teach him lessons Wesley is not capable of learning. Charlie has led a life of crime but has now gone soft thanks to his obsession with Betty, whose smile in a photo helps him mourn his own lost innocence.

Betty is even more of a lost cause. Traumatized by the murder, she has no understanding that the soap opera is a TV show, and her first scene with Kinnear is brilliantly acted by both of them, as she cuts through his Hollywood sarcasm with constant sincerity. Kinnear is completely accurate in playing an actor who has confused his ego with his training, and a scene where Betty is offered a role in the show deals with cruel realism.

Ebert noted, “LaBute previously wrote and directed "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors," films with a deep, harsh cynicism. "Nurse Betty," written by John C. Richards and James Flamberg, is a comedy undercut with dark tones and flashes of violence. Heading inexorably toward a tidy happy ending, LaBute sidesteps cliches like a broken-field runner.”

As for Charlie, his final scene, his only real scene with Betty, has some of Freeman’s best work. “I’m a garbage man of the human soul,” he tells her, “but you’re different.” He is given an almost impossible assignment (heartfelt nostalgia in the middle of a gunfight) and pulls it off, remaining attentive even to the comic subtext.

“Nurse Betty” is one of those films where you don’t know whether to laugh or cringe and find yourself doing both. It’s a challenge: Ebert said, “How do we respond to this loaded material? Audiences lobotomized by one-level stories may find it stimulating or confusing--it's up to them. Once you understand that Charlie and Betty are versions of the same idealistic delusions, that their stories are linked as mirror images, you've got the key.”

I saw this with my brother because he had recorded it on the DVR. We saw this, and it is a Black Comedy, so it was definitely a difficult movie trying to figure out what to laugh at. However, I think everyone should see this because this is one of those strange movies that has to be seen to be believed. When I say strange, it is strange in a good way. This is a good movie and I think everyone will find a lot of enjoyment in how everything unfolds. See it to know what I mean.

Next week we will be looking at a movie that I did see a lot of trailers for growing up and, I believe, I saw it On Demand. I don’t think it was well received, but find out what I thought about it in “Morgan Freeman Month.”