After a summer of cookie-cutter comedies and blowsy action flicks, Neil LaBute’s “Nurse Betty” is good for what ails you. A surrealistic fairy-tale combining farce, hard-as-nails violence, satire, and whimsy in a way that in less skilled hands could be torturous but here seems utterly natural, it has the same kind of off-kilter, dark charm that made “Being John Malkovich” such a standout. It is, quite simply, one of the best pictures of the year.
Working for the first time from a script not his own, LaBute, whose “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends & Neighbors” were harshly cynical and, some thought, deeply misogynistic, manages in this instance to meld his characteristically sour views on human nature with elements of exceptional sweetness, offering up a comedic dish that’s both tangy and somehow innocent despite some periodic bloodletting. The central figure is a Kansas naif, waitress Betty Sizemore (Renee Zellweger), whose sole vice is an overwhelming addiction to a soap opera called “A Reason to Love.” Her devotion to the show is certainly understandable, given that her husband, a used-car salesman named Del (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart) is a thoughtless brute who’s fooling around with his secretary on the side. He’s also involved in some shady drug deals; and one day (Betty’s birthday, as it happens, though Del shows no sign of recognizing that fact), he’s killed in their living room by a pair of hitmen (Charlie and Wesley, played by Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock respectively) over an operation on which he’s tried to cheat their boss. Unknown to the gunmen, Betty, watching her soap in an adjoining room, has seen the murder, but the experience traumatizes her, causing her to forget the entire episode and to believe that she’s the nurse of the title, the long-lost fiance of her television idol, Dr. David Ravell (preening actor George McCord, played by Greg Kinnear). Taking the car in which (unbeknowst to her) the drugs sought by Charlie and Wesley are hidden, Betty takes to the road, heading for L.A. and a reunion with the man she assumes will greet her with open arms. Once there, like a fairy-tale princess-in-disguise, she becomes a heroine, earns the friendship of a family that takes her in, and even meets McCord and his show’s production staff; but none of this occurs in ways that you might expect (the clever script avoids the obvious while portraying Betty as an innocent who strides unscathed through the minefield of life). Meanwhile we watch Charlie and Wesley as they follow her trail. But this doesn’t happen in an expected fashion, either: the two men bicker over how best to proceed, and Charlie, a dignified, introspective fellow by nature, becomes obsessed with his increasingly idealized notion of Betty in a fashion which recalls the mesmerizing power that Kim Novak’s Madeleine had over Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Wesley, with a younger man’s rougher attitudes, explodes periodically over what he perceives as his older partner’s bizarre romanticism. The narrative comes to a climax as Charlie and Wesley locate their quarry and Betty is forced back into the real world, but again, the denouement has its share of surprises, involving among other elements two visitors from Kansas, inept Sheriff Ballard (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and intense reporter Roy (Crispin Glover).
From this precis one might assume that “Nurse Betty” is just a complicated farce, but though it certainly has the elements of that genre (mistaken identities, people who barely miss bumping into others they’re looking for) it isn’t numbingly mechanical in the way that farces often are. Instead it adds layers of characterization and emotion that enrich the mix beautifully. Zellweger’s finely-crafted Betty, for example, isn’t merely a hapless buffoon; she’s an individual of real heart and feeling whom one can actually sympathize with. And Charlie, played with wonderful dignity by Freeman, comes across as a person whose mercenary life is tempered by a soulful, reflective nature. The lesser figures can’t possess the same degree of shading, of course, and some of them–Eckhart’s Del, and even Kinnear’s McCord–are basically one-note creations. But most–Rock’s Wesley, Glover’s Roy, Vince’s Ballard, and Tia Texada’s Rosa–have more going for them than simple facade, and the viewer is also kept delightfully off-balance by the major shifts of tone that regularly occur, particularly as Betty’s idealized visions are threatened by doses of reality and as the actualities of Charlie and Wesley’s violent work burst into view.
“Nurse Betty” is one of those rare pictures whose marvelous unconventionality is wed to a technique that accentuates its strengths rather than camouflaging them, blessed with a cast that revels in its unruly textures rather than trying to smooth them out. It’s also a challenging film whose uniqueness will probably turn off audiences looking for the prefabricated product that Hollywood usually provides. But any filmgoer wanting a refreshingly distinctive experience will find it cinematic balm indeed.