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The
script for Nurse Betty won the Best Screenplay award
at Cannes this year.
Morgan
Freeman gave Oscar-nominated performances in Street Smart
and Driving Miss Daisy.
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Nurse
Betty
Rated
R
Opens Friday,
Sept. 8.
We've all been guilty of it at one time or another: Losing
sight of the line that separates the real world from make-believe.
It's especially easy to do in this age of spectacles like
Cops, Real World and Survivor. But
such "reality" shows aside, it can still be easy to confuse
the made-up characters we see on television with the characters
they portray.
Betty Sizemore (Renée Zellweger) is a floundering
woman, living in Kansas and trapped in a loveless marriage
to Del (Aaron Eckhart), a philandering jackass passing for
a used-car salesman. Betty--who once had aspirations of
being a nurse--is hopelessly devoted to the soap opera A
Reason to Love. When Betty accidentally witnesses a
brutal act of violence involving Del, she lapses into a
state of traumatic shock, blocking out the incident and
retreating to a delusional world where she's a nurse and
Reason's lead character, Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear),
is her estranged fiancé. Betty goes on a mission
to find her long-lost love, but unbeknownst to her, Charlie
(Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock), two determined
hit men, are out to pop a cap in her ass.
Zellweger can be so annoying she makes you want to kick
a dog, but her unique style of girl-next-door-always-on-the-verge-of-blubbering
acting actually works well for Nurse Betty. The real
stars of the film, though, are Freeman and Rock, whose dynamic
hit-man team overshadows such classic gun-for-hire duos
as Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager in The Killers and
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
Freeman, whose career has been marred by films undeserving
of his talent, delivers one of his best performances and
should earn an Oscar nomination. Comparisons to Jackson's
jeri-curled performance in Pulp Fiction are inevitable,
but Freeman's character--which was probably written for
a white actor--is far more complex and better realized.
Nurse Betty wryly examines the way television influences
real life, which in turn influences television, which in
turn influences real life. Director Neil LaBute and screenwriters
John C. Richards and James Flamberg dissect the nature of
fantasy and escapism. It's a world where wants and desires
can make people do some crazy shit: Betty living in her
delusional world, the people who go along with her rubber-room
behavior, and Charlie the hit man, who has a growing infatuation
with her--a "love" fueled by nothing more than a few photos
and what other people have told him about the woman he is
contracted to kill.
At first Nurse Betty seems like a bold departure
for director LaBute, whose previous misanthropy-fests In
the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors
left audiences wanting to scrub themselves down with disinfectant
and Brillo. But despite Nurse Betty's irreverent
mix of dark comedy and brutal violence, it's a film with
as disturbing a resonance as LaBute's earlier work--only
wrapped in a slightly brighter package.
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