sweet
'n' low:
nurse betty
bash: latter day plays |
director
Neil LaBute
screenwriters
John C. Richards
James Flamberg
story
by
John C. Richards
producers
Steve Golin
Gail Mutrux
cinematographer
Jean-Yves Escoffier
music
Rolfe Kent
editors
Joel Plotch
Steven Weisberg
cast
Renée Zellweger (Betty Sizemore)
Morgan Freeman (Charlie)
Chris Rock (Wesley)
Greg Kinnear (Dr. David Ravell/George McCord)
Aaron Eckhart (Del Sizemore)
Tia Texada (Roza Hernandez)
Crispin Glover (Roy Ostery)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (Sheriff Eldon Ballard)
Allison Janney (Lyla Branch)
Kathleen Wilhoite (Sue Ann Rogers)
Elizabeth Mitchell (Chloe Jensen)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 110m
u.s.
release: 9/8/00
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other neil
labute films
reviewed on this website:
- in
the company of men
- possession
- the shape of things
- the wicker man (2006)
- your friends & neighbors
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Every so often, usually at
the end of a long dry spell, a movie comes along that cuts through
the garbage and reminds you what movies are for. Pulp
Fiction was one of those films that stated loud and clear,
"This is what you want, you just didn't know it until now";
L.A. Confidential was another,
and now there is Nurse Betty -- a characteristically deceptive
name for a movie of such surprising depth. It left me more than
a little rattled; with a director like Neil LaBute (In
the Company of Men, Your
Friends & Neighbors) and a cast including Renée
Zellweger, Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock, I expected to be amused.
I didn't expect to be moved.
Zellweger stars as Betty Sizemore, a Kansas waitress married
to a loutish car salesman named Del (LaBute regular Aaron Eckhart).
The first reel or so is like the expected LaBute film in miniature:
Del is thoroughly contemptible -- he cheats on Betty and forgets
her birthday (he absently eats the birthday cupcake given to
her at work) -- and he gets a swift comeuppance when he runs
afoul of two hit-men, Charlie (Freeman) and Wesley (Rock), who
accompany him to his house looking for some hidden drugs. Unbeknownst
to everyone, Betty is also in the house, watching her favorite
soap opera A Reason to Love at low volume. She eavesdrops
on the men's business meeting long enough to see Del dispatched
in a particularly gruesome way not seen much in movies outside
of Westerns.
The entire sweetly optimistic movie grows out of the shock and
horror of Del's murder, and Betty's reaction to it. Betty can't
process it; somewhere in her mind, she puts a wall up against
what she's seen, and is compelled to go to Los Angeles to find
Dr. David Revell, a dashing doctor on A Reason to Love.
Revell is played by a hack actor named George McCord, who in
turn is played by the much more skillful Greg Kinnear. Like Robin
Williams' medieval trip in The Fisher
King, Betty's fantasy is literally escapist, a
flight from ugly reality, and she latches onto the blank Dr.
Revell as the embodiment of true love and happiness. Meanwhile,
Charlie and Wesley hit the road in pursuit of Betty, and Charlie
develops his own fantasy image of Betty -- her image draws him
out of cynicism and makes this seasoned assassin believe that
innocence is actually still possible.
It would be a mistake to think that LaBute wants us to laugh
at Betty or Charlie for their delusions. This is the first movie
he's directed from a script he didn't write (John C. Richards
and James Flamberg did the screenplay, a prizewinner at Cannes),
and it suggests a new direction for LaBute -- not sell-out, exactly,
but generosity of spirit. Nurse Betty has an undertone
of sadness and trauma even in the cheeriest of moments; we don't
want Betty to snap out of her fugue state and remember everything,
and when the actor George brings Betty to the set of A Reason
to Love and asks her to act with the cast -- thinking that
she's an ambitious actress with a great gift for improv -- Renée
Zellweger's performance, which up till then had been soulfully
touching, comes close to heartbreak.
LaBute treats his cast gently (except maybe for Eckhart, who's
still paying for the creep he played in Company); he gets
an atypical turn out of Chris Rock, not remotely his usual hyperactive
self here -- I don't think he smiles once. Freeman, too, puts
across Charlie's increasingly giddy attraction to Betty, sharing
an imaginary dance with her at the Grand Canyon; left to his
own devices, the old LaBute would never have allowed himself
such a ... well, romantic moment. I read Nurse Betty
as LaBute's movement from theater (which his previous two movies
essentially are: filmed plays) to movies -- the escapist
spell they can cast on us. Without an ounce of cleverness or
hipness, the film quietly speaks volumes about why we go to movies,
and then proves it.
Those nostalgic
for the old, venomous LaBute may have had a chance to catch the
recent Showtime presentation of bash: latter day plays,
his trio of one-acts centering on a variety of fallen Mormons
(hence the subtitle). Shot on video during a December 1999 performance
in Beverly Hills, the plays depend a bit on surprise for their
full impact. LaBute lets his characters pour out their rage and
grief in gushers of unadorned monologue. Each of the plays --
"A Gaggle of Saints," with Calista Flockhart and Paul
Rudd as two young Mormons on an eventful trip to New York; "Medea
Redux" (okay, so the title pretty much gives that one away),
with Flockhart delivering the long, seething story of her teenage
affair with a teacher and her subsequent pregnancy; and "Iphegenia
in Orem," with Ron Eldard as a panicky mid-management type
driven to the edge in order to protect his income -- focuses
on a character who catches us up, involves us with humor or brittle
humanity, and by the time they get around to confessing their
hideous sin it's too late to back off from them.
By the third playlet (the order
of plays has been shuffled around in other productions), the
evil bloom is somewhat off the thorny rose -- you wonder what
rank offense the monologue will lead to. Still, any writing that
can pull such scathing performances out of elsewhere amiable
actors (Flockhart, in her "Medea" role, is a particular
revelation) makes up for the gloomy machine at its core, the
drumbeat announcing secret sin hidden by self-justification.
It's all brilliantly written and performed, as always, but also,
by now, a tad stale. If nothing else, Nurse Betty is a
step away from LaBute country, and possibly a necessary one:
How much longer can he set up characters and then bash them?
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