Nurse Betty (2000)

I always hear people complaining that Hollywood is out of ideas, and that they should do something more creative. Then a film like “Nurse Betty” comes along, and they still don’t like it. I loved it, the originality, the cast, the writing and the dark humor. I had to laugh so many times, Zellweger did such a great job playing Betty, balancing the tension of her delusional positivity with a buried sadness that is so delicate, it is heartbreaking to see.

After witnessing her crazy husbands death, played by Aaron Eckhart, Betty starts to believe she’s the fiancée of her soap opera idol, played wonderfully by Greg Kinnear. Her husband gets killed by Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock, who then are chasing after Betty. The writing is hilarious, I think, and the little complex story is very well executed. The scene where Bette introduces herself to the writers and some of the cast of her favorite soap opera “A Reason to Love” is one of the best balancing acts of conflicting views of reality I have ever seen on screen. Renee deserved her Golden Globe, she carried this film on her shoulders, and made it watchable.

Trailer:

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1939734809/

We see Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear, Tia Texada, Crispin Glover, Allison Janney and Aaron Eckhart in a weird comedy where Betty Sizemore (Zellweger) is a Kansas City waitress with dreams of becoming a nurse, and as we follow her around in a day we begin to realize how desperately she is trying to keep going by losing herself in a false positivity sustained by soap opera platitudes, but that these are becoming increasingly more difficult to apply to her sad life and bad marriage. She then becomes delusional after witnessing her no-good car salesman husband murdered. Becoming delusional from shock, she becomes convinced that she is the former fiancée of her soap opera idol. What she also believes is that the soap opera is real and goes to LA to find the hospital where he works as a cardiologist. Meanwhile, her husband’s murderers are searching for the drugs stolen by her husband and, as luck would have it, they are stored in the trunk of the car she drove off in. Freeman, an aging hit man planning his retirement after this job, also becomes delusional about the woman he is tracking.

  1. allyouneedismovies posted this