|
Welcome back to the twisted world of Neil LaBute, following his incredibly
poignant and twisted takes on the male psyche and our sexual mores in his previous films In The
Company Of Men and Your Friends And Neighbours he has returned with an altogether different vision
of life in the modern world.
Renee Zellwegger (Me,Myself & Irene, Bridget Jones' Diary) is the eponymous heroine of
the title - Betty, a waitress living a drab, lonely life with her cheating husband (LaBute regular
Aaron Eckhart) and obsessed with a popular TV soap opera, a hospital drama featuring dashing Dr.
David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). When a business deal goes wrong Betty's husband is murdered by two hit
men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) and Betty, a witness to the crime, loses her sense of reality
and begins to think she is embroiled in a story line from the soap-opera and decides to travel to
LA to find the fantasy doctor, followed by the bickering hit men. Once in LA she begins a series of
adventures which question our perception of reality and chronicle Betty's growing sense of worth.
At first glance it would appear that LaBute has taken a major departure from the black
social comment of his previous films and is trying to make a more Hollywood friendly picture.
Certainly we do not have anything as dark as Jason Patrick describing his best sexual experience as the rape of a schoolboy as in Your Friends And Neighbours but then this film is much less about sex than LaBute's past films. Also this film is told almost entirely from Betty's point of view, which differs wildly from the male orientated vision of his previous work. Essentially LaBute is examining the essential role of fantasy as a human necessity. Each character has very clear dreams and aspirations which are often at odds with the reality of their existence. Indeed LaBute has chosen the framework of a soap opera itself as the basis of the film. From the beginning the film carries a host of cliched characters and story lines into what is essentially an impossible fantasy, we have all manner of cheap soap like plot devices which are used to propel Betty towards her inevitable ugly duckling into beautiful swan transformation. LaBute makes this point especially clear towards the end with some amusing revelations about the characters and their relationships with each other.
The cast are a dream team for such a project. Zellwegger superbly realises the enigmatic
Betty and oozes sweetness that could only come from such a misguided and trusting character. Her
character is underpinned by the two male leads, Freeman as the philosophical hit man who is falling
in love with Betty's complete innocence and Kinnear as the smug self-centred actor who is so shallow
that he sleeps with Betty never realising that she is essentially deranged. It is also worth noting
that there are some great small character parts throughout the film , Aaron Eckhart's redneck car
salesman being a particularly brilliant performance, also Crispin Glover and Chris Rock deliver
excellent support.
Ultimately what is lacking in this film is a feeling of fluidity. LaBute brings us such great
characters but ultimately we are only really interested in Betty, the only truly unreal character,
this produces a stop-start feeling through the movie as the various side-plots are inter cut into
the main story.
Do not be put off by Zellwegger's rise over the last year into the Julia Roberts for the
noughties - this is an excellent film.
RATING: (c)Matt Cartwright 2001
|
Nurse Betty (Dir. Neil LaBute, 2000)
