Paul J. Nemecek Nurse Betty is a film about a meek waitress and wife who is thrown into bizarre circumstances and responds in an equally bizarre fashion. Rene Zelwegger plays the waitress who is married to a domineering, boorish used-car salesman. Her husband is also up to his ears in illegal wheeling and dealing unbeknownst to his wife. Betty deals with the dreariness of her day-to-day life by losing herself in a soap opera, and by fantasizing about one of the characters in the soap (a debonair doctor played by Greg Kinnear). When something happens to her husband, Betty snaps and projects herself into her soap opera fantasy world. She leaves town and drives to Los Angeles looking for the object of her affections. The two criminals who had dealings with her husband pursue her to LA so that they can tidy up loose ends.In one sense, this film is a standard crime/suspense film. A deeper look reveals a slightly more complex story line about the increasingly thin line between fantasy and fiction on the one hand and the "real world." In this sense, Nurse Betty is a postmodern film with much in common with films like Fargo and Pulp Fiction. The rapid movement between tender moments, funny scenes, and gruesome scenes is standard fare in films with postmodern sensibilities, so much so that the device is already a bit of a cliché.Nurse Betty also has much in common with films like EDTV, the Truman Show, and Pleasantville. All of these films deal with the postmodern obsession with virtual reality and simulated reality. There are some interesting issues raised in the film and there are clever turns in the story line. The real strength of the film is the superior performance by Rene Zellwegger and the great supporting performance by Morgan Freeman as the hitman with a heart of gold.The greatest weakness of the film is also in the acting. Chris Rock plays Morgan Freeman's partner and basically plays the same obnoxious character that he played in Lethal Weapon 4--a film that has earned a special place on the list of films I despise. This film has some merit, and could generate some interesting conversations about our media-obsessed society and how it connects with what Thoreau referred to as our "lives of quiet desperation." While I like the basic theme and was impressed by some of the performances, I did not find it as interesting as Pleasantville or as engaging as The Truman Show. When you add the gruesome violence and other gratuitous insertions in Nurse Betty, most viewers would probably have a better time with the video version of one of the films mentioned above.

evanston_dad Neil LaBute's uneasy blend of thriller and dark comedy is a queasy affair.LaBute doesn't have a light touch at all, which more than anything is what a film like this desperately needs. He begins the movie with a scene of intensely graphic violence, and it's hard to recover from it. You can't sit back and enjoy the film's comedic elements when you're not sure when or if something horrible is going to happen again.Renee Zellweger does her best, but she's in the hands of a director who's out of his element.Grade: C

secondtake Nurse Betty (2000)This is a sleeper, a dark comedy with enough inventive twists to call to mind The Truman Show but with a greater sense of reality to hold it down. Renee Zellweger is flawless as the naive, sweet, but utterly detached young woman named Betty who is addicted to a soap opera called "A Reason to Love." This seems sweet enough, but her husband is a jerk (totally) and things start to spiral, and get dizzy, as reality even for the viewer starts to shift ground.Not that you are ever confused about what is happening or who the good guys are. The good guys are not Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock, for sure, as this unlikely and comedic father and son duo get involved, incidentally at first, in Betty's strange inner and outer life. A chase of sorts ensues, the soap opera becomes reality, and then reality becomes soap opera. And it's really hilarious and inventive and fast paced.Is it a total work of genius? Probably not. Maybe Charlie Kaufman would have added another twist in there (I'm not sure how), and certainly some of the side characters could have seemed less cardboard, or less awkward as actors. But Zellweger is unbelievable (really, your jaw might drop at how convincing she could play her mental blindness, and her awakening, of sorts). And Morgan Freeman is his usually convincing and engaging self. The utterly disgusting violence of one 20 second scene might turn off some viewers near the beginning, but if you can keep watching, the movie gets better from there. Much better.

I_John_Barrymore_I 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.