Nurse Betty
Directed by Neil LaBute.
Starring Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear.
Anyone who has seen a few scenes from Days of Our Lives or any other American soap opera will find themselves chuckling during the film Nurse Betty. But this film is no comedy and has a much darker side that tries to explore the area where fantasy and reality become obscured.
Betty Sizemore, superbly played by Renée Zellweger is a small-town waitress and devoted viewer of ‘A Reason to Love’. This daytime soap opera about life and love in a hospital is Betty’s fantasy world, which helps her to cope with the reality of her bad marriage and the fact that she never managed to become a nurse herself.
When she accidentally witnesses the violent murder of her no-good husband who has been involved in a drug deal, Betty is traumatised into a state of ‘dissociative fugue’, which erases her past and transfers her into a new identity and new reality. She ‘becomes’ Nurse Betty, a character from the soap opera, and sets off for Los Angeles in search of ‘her’ true love Dr. Ravell (Greg Kinnear). Through a series of events straight out of a soap opera Betty gets a job as a nurse and eventually comes face to face with the actor who plays Dr. Ravell in ‘A Reason to Love’ and fantasy collides with reality.
Meanwhile as a balance to Betty’s alternate world, the two hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) who killed her husband, provide dark offbeat humour as they desperately search for her and the drugs they believe she has stolen, following her trail more by luck than anything else. Finally all the threads of the story are pulled together as reality emerges again, before Nurse Betty concludes with a true soap opera ending. Neil LaBute has managed to blur the lines between the real world and the world of the soap opera quite successfully for most of the film, however three deliberately violent scenes are not quite ‘over the top’ enough and seem too real. Overall an enjoyable film, original and deserving of the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival but still not one to put on the ‘must see’ list.
Uncle Al
