Released September 8, 2000:

Can a fairy tale have a dark undertone below all the bubbly whimsy? Hell, the Grimm tales were barbaric before they became homogenized, sanitized, and finally Disneytized. Nurse Betty presents a modern day fairy tale with the strike of reality always below it — the strike of darkness and disappointment. Fairy tales are an escape from this, but what if one creates her own fairy tale and chooses to believe in it over the drab reality she presides in?

Neil LaBute, the director of the incessantly dark In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, collects together a whimsical modern day fable with a top-notch cast. Yes, to those fans of earlier LaBute offeriengs his name doesn’t seem synonymous with whimsical comedy – but in this flick LaBute cuts his teeth in the mainstream and earns his stripes if ever.

Baby-voiced and rosy-cheeked Renee Zellweger plays our heroine in diner worker and soap opera fanatic Betty. Betty finds solace from her life featuring a sleazy spouse, played with marvelous flair by Aaron Eckhart, in her favorite soap opera. When her louche of a hubby isn’t wiping his hands on the kitchen curtains or banging his secretary he tries proposing drug deals for shady characters. A recent drug peddling snafu sets him up to an ominous encounter with hitmen team Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock. Through a jarring scene of violence Betty’s husband is left brutally murdered and the only witness is Betty herself. The event causes Betty to slip into a fractured psychological state where she believes the world of her soap opera is alive and real with herself a vital character. She hops in one of her dead hubby’s used cars and drives off toward California to meet the doctor/soap star of her dreams in Greg Kinnear.

Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock mistake Betty for a criminal mastermind and believe her to have taken the drugs and run. They embark on their own mad dash to capture her and finish the job they were paid to complete. Along the way Betty encounters many people that are at first confused but ultimately charmed by this delusional dame. Through a series of events she meets up with the eternally smarmy Kinnear and begins to learn what happens when a fantasy is corrupted by the disappointment of reality. Allison Janey has a small part as a network executive that shines strong, and Crispin “McFly” Glovin is just nice to see in a film again. He doesn’t seem to age though. Maybe he has that Dick Clark disease.

The flow of Betty is well paced and a smart mix between drama, whimsy, and dark humor. Overlooking some sudden bursts of violence bookend the film it comes across as a sweet yet intelligent satire and fable. Betty is looking for her Prince Charming but will later learn that she doesn’t need one, that she is the fairy tale happy ending inside her.

The acting of Nurse Betty is never in danger of flat-lining. Zelwegger is a lovable and good-natured heroine. Freeman is a strong and deceptively hilarious actor along side a caustic yet down-to-earth Rock. And I make an outgoing question if there is an actor alive out there that can do smarm better than Kinnear — I think not.

Nurse Betty is a wonderful surprise. Check into your local theater, take one showing, and call me in the morning. You’ll be glad you did.

Nate’s Grade: A-

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

I was high on Nurse Betty in 2000 declaring it a modern-day fable with a darker undercurrent equivalent to that of the Grimms and their mixture of the everyday and extraordinary. In reality, Nurse Betty couldn’t feel more like a holdover of the 1990s indie scene where it might have been an unwritten rule that after Pulp Fiction every indie film had to have a subplot involving quippy hitmen (consider it the equivalent of every 1980s comedy having a mafia subplot for some unexplained reason). It feels engineered from a different era, and because of this, I’m sad to say that Nurse Betty hasn’t aged as well as I hoped. It’s not a bad movie but it feels more dated and peculiar, both in design and also unintentionally with its mishmashing tones that were more enticing twenty years ago.

The premise of Nurse Betty sounds like two movies smashed together. The movie is almost split evenly among its two storylines. We have Betty (Renee Zellweger) as the put-upon wife in Kansas dreaming of a better life, and maybe a better husband, who then has a mental breakdown and travels cross-country believing she’s in a real-life soap opera. Following suit is a pair of hitmen (Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock) who bicker and track her down, having their own cross-country road trip and getting on each other’s nerves. The problem with the screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg is that these two competing stories could have existed on their own and probably would have been the better for it. It’s revealed late in the movie that Rock is the son of Freeman, and by that time of the reveal it doesn’t do much other than serve as a hasty attempt at a twist ending and to better push the fatalism of Freeman’s character, Charlie. However, if we knew from early on that this was a father-son hit team, think of the fun family squabbles and opportunities to present character development through these unique circumstances. It’s a father trying to train his son in his many years honed killing targets and not questioning why. You could tell a really quirky, compelling, and engaging family story through this dark comedy vehicle. Instead, the father-son hitmen are simply playing catch-up with Betty. Charlie becomes substantially less interesting the more obsessed with Betty he becomes because his character change is never really explained. Even he is unable to articulate why this one woman has entranced him. He stops being the scary, proud, and imposing figure who killed Betty’s husband and becomes a doddering, foolishly love-struck old man that loses his edge. Again, that arc could work but the screenplay essentially nullifies him as a threat and as a multi-dimensional character. If both of these dangerous men had driven off into their own movie, they and we would have better benefited.

The Betty half is the more entertaining portion because it’s more unpredictable and because Betty is, at her heart, a sweet human being who is looking for her dream. It doesn’t take much to emotionally identify with her mistreated character who seeks an outlet for her life’s disappointments. Her mental break produces a sizeable degree of nervous laughter whenever she encounters someone new who is taking her at literal face value. Should we be laughing at her? Should we be pitying her? Should we be worrying about her having reality crush her hopes? The movie doesn’t seem to be holding up Betty for cheap mockery, which is a relief considering the quantity of her mental illness and trauma leading her into increasingly comical scenarios. The baffled misunderstandings can supply amusement but it’s more waiting to see how Betty responds to adversity and waiting for reality to hit with crushing force, eventually snapping her back. It’s waiting for the realization, but until then you can enjoy Betty’s blissful delusion like a sitcom character being hit over the head and thinking they’re somebody new. The movie takes on a new level of entertainment when she meets the man of her desires, Dr. David (Greg Kinnear), actually the actor George in real-life, and he doesn’t reject her but becomes fascinated with her. He’s impressed by her level of commitment to Method acting, so he assumes, and is curious how far she can keep things going. Betty also seems to bring back George’s passion for acting, which has waned over years of playing the same over-the-top plot machinations of daytime television. That’s such a better storytelling choice than having her dream man push her away immediately for being outwardly crazy.

The winning feature of Nurse Betty is the relentless positivity and daffy, perky performance of Zellweger as our dream-seeker. She always has a smile and go-get-‘em attitude that makes her compelling to watch and also easy to root for, whether or not she ever comes out of her mental break. Her sunny demeanor in the face of medical horror and confused authority figures is reliably charming. Zellweger never plays like the joke should be on Betty. Often it boomerangs, like when her L.A. roommate wants to dash Betty’s dream by introducing her to the real George, but instead of disaster they walk off to spend the rest of the fancy soiree together. Zellweger is the best reason to step into Nurse Betty and her portrayal of mental illness is not meant for ridicule. After Nurse Betty, Zellweger went on a tear, getting three Oscar nominations in three years, and a win for 2003’s Cold Mountain, before disappearing from Hollywood to re-emerge with a different face.

The jumbled tones proved more amusing to me twenty years ago but now they feel sloppy and poorly integrated, hence why it feels like two separate movies inelegantly melded together. The violence can be jarring and too serious for a movie that also attempts goofball whimsy. It feels like Nurse Betty was assembled with all the loose, leftover bits of irony from the 90s indie scene. It’s a bit of a hodgepodge movie that feels like it was green-lit based upon as many of its discordant elements all appearing under the name of one movie. Soap operas. Housewives. Mental illness! Road trips! Hitmen! Oh my! The soap opera jokes and industry satire feel pretty dated and must have been stale even by the time the film was released twenty years ago. There are points watching Nurse Betty where you feel like it went shopping for its quirk and bought it whole sale.

Director Neil LaBute was a fascinating choice considering his prior work writing and directing very misanthropic small-scale ensemble dramas like 1997’s In the Company of Men where two toxic men set out to ruin an innocent deaf woman to punish the female gender they feel has done them wrong. This seemed like an odd fit but was a preview to LaBute’s attempts at being a journeyman mid-range director, helming the stunningly bad 2006’s Wicker Man remake as well as completely forgettable studio fare like Lakeview Terrace and the Death at a Funeral remake. LaBute has since found a home writing and directing in television, including writing 15 episodes of the SyFy Channel series, Van Helsing, which well and truly confounded me to learn. The man who was responsible for dark, David Mamet-esque plays about the searing depths of human depravity and toxic masculinity was writing low-budget vampire cable television. To be fair I haven’t watched a single episode so perhaps his prior writing experiences really added something to the tale of Vanessa Helsing kicking ass in a vampire-dominated future. Actually, I take it all back because that sounds like a fun show.

Nurse Betty is a dark comedy that surprises as often as it may frustrate, spinning two different stories on a collision course that would have benefited from a trial separation. It’s one of the first re-review films that has lost some of its magic for me. In 2000, this movie felt a lot more daring and hipper and I gave it credit for the inclusion of so many off-kilter elements. Nowadays, I need more from a movie than simply including unexpected elements. It has to make the most of them, incorporate them in meaningful and challenging ways, and justify their tonal integration. Reading over my original review twenty years ago, I cringe about how uncritical it proves to be. I clearly enjoyed the movie but couldn’t say much more than bad puns and obvious allusions (did you know fairy tales could be, get this, dark and unnerving?). This is not one of my finer film reviews and I won’t cut my 18-year-old self any slack because I’ve been impressed by the insights and writing style of my younger me before. I will hold my past self to higher standards, thank me.

Re-Review Grade: B-