Nurse Betty film review

certificate_18

NURSE BETTY

Soap operas are the opium for the masses, a distorted reflection of the real world, and their characters are the friends and lovers (and sometimes enemies) whose trials and tribulations supplant our own.

Coffee shop waitress Betty Sizemore (Renie Zellweger) is a devotee of the soap opera A Reason To Love. Every day, she watches raptly as Dr David Ravell, played by actor George McCord (Greg Kinnear), looks dashing in his hospital scrubs and tries to come to terms with the death of his wife.

Dr Ravell is Betty's dream man, a caring and sensitive guy who knows how to woo a woman: the antithesis of her husband Del (Aaron Eckhart), a good-for-nothing second-hand car salesman who treats her like dirt, sleeps around and forgets her birthday.

During one of her late night videotape sessions, Betty secretly witnesses Del being brutally murdered by hit men Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock). She is completely traumatised by this savage event and retreats from reality into her own fantasy world in which she is Nurse Betty, former love of Dr David Ravell, whom she dumped six years ago at the altar.

Blissfully happy in her fugue state, Betty packs her bags and leaves Kansas in one of the Buicks on Del's car lot for Los Angeles to find her beloved David and orchestrate a reunion.

Unfortunately, Charlie and Wesley are hot on her trail - the former completely obsessed with her, the latter convinced she is a cold and calculating criminal -as are the town sheriff, Ballard (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and local reporter Roy Ostrey (Crispin Glover) who are both investigating Del's murder.

The plot underpinning Nurse Betty is every bit as far-fetched as a soap opera, and there's a definite sense that director Neil LaBute is satirising and parodying the genre. He strikes a fine balance between comedy and drama, punctuating Betty's deluded bid for love with random acts of violence (usually instigated by Charlie and Wesley) which drag the film back into the real world.

The build-up is painfully slow, but for the middle 30 minutes at least, John C Richards and James Flamberg's screenplay is poetry in motion, poking fun at celebrities who crave the adoration of their fans, and exploring the grey area separating hero-worship from stalking.