Fugue for One
Nurse Betty (18)
On general release. Written by John Richards and James Flamberg; directed by Neil La Butte; starring Renee Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear
The utter ignorance of anyone without the benefit of hindsight is astonishing. Did contemporary critics really slate Psycho? Did they really attack Beethoven? By definition, you can't see your own blind spots. Nurse Betty seems to me to be a very flawed film, one that strikes for too many targets, and tries too much. Nearly fatally for an American effort, it assumes the intelligence of the audience is pretty high. In short, it's a very good film indeed, and likely to be under-rated.
First off, the writers have an iron grip on character. We can see Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock's hit men as comic characters, as their petty concerns undermine their professions reputations. Others might not see them like that, and don't. Because Freeman is the more likeable of the two, it would be easy to consider his performance the best in the film. Rock, however, sticks with the obnoxiousness of his character, and steals the movie.
Nurse Betty is, in the end, gentle and feel good. But all concerned get there by the most radical route. Start with a slow character development. Betty (Renee Zellweger), soap fixated waitress, altogether nice, a little dreamy, and under appreciated. Her husband, Del, is a monster of insensitivity, and the charge sheet against him would lengthen this review considerably. From character setting, the story turns to Tarantino torture murder; Freeman feathering the accelerator just right. For Betty to turn into complete denial would take some major trauma, and this is a beauty. The violence is absolutely integral to the plot. Whether it is wise to hinge a story on an arcane psychological state is open to debate.
This killing does something else. It breaks the expectations of the genre. This isn't going to be a 'safe' movie. Just because Freeman and Rock develop as persons, we can't forget how dangerous they remain.
Betty, in denial, blanks out the killing, and writes in an affair with Dr David Ravell, on the corn soap 'A Reason to Love'. She goes out to find him. Suffice to say that Nurse Betty is a movie: she does. Maybe because Zellweger is beyond pretty, he likes her. Everyone 'real' finds the fugue state Betty a little odd. There is a definite border between real folks and unreal folks here. Unreal folks are actors and hitmen, who inhabit their own moral bubbles. In LA, among film people, Betty quirkiness is overlooked. Perhaps the satire here, if intentional, is a little thin.
In fiction, the good end happily and the bad unhappily. For all the Nurse Betty twists the expectations, it comes over as warm, and with a real moral purpose lacking in more testosterone high directors.
Nurse Betty is a film of this time, the ending more radical than it first seems, with its take on the word 'happy'. And having spent the last two hours prodding at the old 'men this; women that' problem, nicely hints that the differences are not all that great. In an industry where women hit obsolence earlier than men, Kathleen Turner, remember, is a crone, thirty something girl and sexuagenarian boy doesn't surprise. That Morgan Freeman suggests love madness (without ever stating as much), over this age gap, seems so fresh that it must violate some taboo. Of course there's the race thing too. Nurse Betty is unlikely to wow Alabama.
Oh, I felt good on leaving this film, it's not Ibsen, but the emotional maturity is beyond most cinema fodder. There's an annoying emphasis on acting by expression. But, as Rock says to Freeman, 'You only got one look.' Even that can be forgiven.
