Nurse Betty
USA 1999
Reviewed by Phillip Kemp
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Fair Oaks, Kansas. Waitress Betty Sizemore, who dreams of becoming a nurse, is a fan of the television hospital soap A Reason to Love, whose lead character is Dr David Ravell. Unknown to her, her car-dealer husband Del is running drugs. Two hitmen, Charlie and Wesley, pay Del a visit, during which the car salesman is killed. Witnessing his murder, Betty is shocked into a fugue state; believing herself the ex-fiancée of Dr Ravell she sets out for California to find him, driving a Buick containing the drugs the hitmen are after.
While Sheriff Eldon Ballard and reporter Roy Ostrey investigate the murder, the hitmen set off after Betty, with Charlie increasingly fascinated by his quarry. In LA, Betty lucks into a hospital job by saving an accident victim, and finds lodgings with his sister Rosa. At a ball attended by the stars of A Reason to Love, Betty meets George McCord who plays Dr Ravell and starts treating him as her lost love. George, imagining she's improvising, gets her a part in the soap. Confronted by cameras, Betty is shocked out of her fugue.
The hitmen track Betty down to Rosa's house, ahead of Eldon and Roy. While Wesley holds the others at gun point, Charlie discovers Betty knew nothing of the drugs. A gun battle erupts: Wesley is killed and Charlie wounded. The police arrive. Betty, who has seized Charlie's gun, returns it so he can die with dignity. Betty lands a role in the soap.
Review
Neil LaBute has been widely accused - not without reason - of revelling in misogyny, misanthropy and cruelty. Given this, Nurse Betty may come as a surprise. True, some fairly unpleasant things happen, but mostly to characters who deserve them: the repellent Del Sizemore gets scalped and shot dead for being not only a used-car salesman, drug-dealer and abusive husband, but for sporting a hideous mullet. It's surely no coincidence that he's played by Aaron Eckhart, who took the role of chief predator Chad in LaBute's first film In the Company of Men. LaBute has said that letting Chad get away with his loathsome behaviour in that film made it "more potent"; having Del meet his comeuppance so decisively signals that we're in a rather different kind of movie.
For although LaBute can't resist injecting the occasional acidic squirt, his latest film ends up as a fair simulacrum of a romantic comedy-thriller where the good end happily and the bad unhappily - this being, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, the definition of fiction. Which is appropriate enough, since Nurse Betty repeatedly zeroes in on the crossover point where fiction shades into fantasy, television-fed fantasy in particular. Knowingly scripted by ex-stand-up comedian John C. Richards and music editor James Flamberg, the film at once mocks and purloins the narrative conventions of daytime soap. When, in the final shoot-out, Charlie reveals that his fellow hitman Wesley is his son, it's precisely the sort of melodramatic bombshell soaps depend on; but it also makes sense dramatically, for why else would the professional Charlie put up with hot-headed Wesley?
Throughout, Nurse Betty plays this kind of juggling game. The central plot conceit of Betty's fugue - which Reneé Zellweger's waitress is shocked into when she witnesses the murder of husband Del - is a latter-day take on amnesia, that reliable old standby of soap writers; and more than once, as we're about to chortle at some especially crass line of dialogue, it's revealed to be a quote from the soap-within-the-movie, A Reason to Love. Following soapland's penchant for providing running updates for new viewers, the film's characters constantly define each other in neat encapsulations: Charlie talks of Betty as "sort of a wholesome Doris Day figure" and describes himself as "a garbage man of the human condition".
Where the film most clearly locks into LaBute's former preoccupations is that people's assumptions about each other are shown to be essentially unreliable. Betty's grasp of the supposed love of her life Dr Ravell, the character played by actor George McCord in A Reason to Love, has as much depth as the life-size cut-out of him she totes around, while George admiringly tells her "You're so real" just when she's most deeply mired in fantasy.
With more than one nod to The Wizard of Oz (Betty quits drab Kansas for West Coast Neverland, with Ravell/McCord as her phoney wizard), Nurse Betty seems to suggest that most of us end up creating our own delusional refuge from reality, and that finding it in a soap is no worse an option than most. Adopting a more fluid camera style than usual, courtesy of DP Jean Yves Escoffier (Good Will Hunting), LaBute draws nuanced performances from his cast, giving Greg Kinnear his best role yet as McCord, while Zellweger keeps a shrewd rein on the ditziness. But while Nurse Betty proves that LaBute has more than one string to his bow, you can't help thinking that he makes more memorable cinema when revelling in misanthropy.
Credits
- Director
- Neil LaBute
- Producers
- Gail Mutrux
- Steve Golin
- Screenplay
- John C. Richards
- James Flamberg
- Based on a story by
- John C. Richards
- Director of Photography
- Jean Yves Escoffier
- Editors
- Joel Plotch
- Steven Weisberg
- Production Designer
- Charles Breen
- Music
- Rolfe Kent
- Production Companies
- Gramercy Pictures presents in association with Pacifica Film Distribution a Propaganda Films/ab'-strakt pictures/IMF
- production
- Executive Producers
- Philip Steuer
- Stephen Pevner
- Moritz Borman
- Chris Sievernich
- Associate Producers
- W. Mark McNair
- Albert Shapiro
- Production Co-ordinator
- Karen Ruth Getchell
- Rome Unit
- Production Services
- Panorama Films
- Marco Valerio Pugini
- Ute Leonhardt
- Production Manager
- Rome Unit:
- Fabio Massimo Dell'Orco
- Unit Production Manager
- Tim Clawson
- Location Managers
- John Panzarella
- Rome Unit:
- Enrico Latella
- Post-production Supervisor
- Steven Kaminsky
- 2nd Unit Director
- Philip Steuer
- Assistant Directors
- Albert Shapiro
- Susan J. Hellmann
- Philip L. Hardage
- Rome Unit:
- Enrico Mastracchi Manes
- Script Supervisor
- Alexa Alden
- Casting
- Heidi Levitt
- Monika Mikkelsen
- ADR Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Dean Lyras
- Camera Operator
- Michael Chavez
- Special Effects Co-ordinator
- Larz Anderson
- Video/Computer Graphics Supervisor
- Elizabeth Radley
- Graphic Artist
- Melissa Mollo
- Associate Editor
- Joseph C. Bond IV
- Art Director
- Gary Diamond
- Set Designers
- Henry Alberti
- Stan Tropp
- Set Decorator
- Jeffrey Kushon
- Costume Designer
- Lynette Meyer
- Costume Supervisor
- Shari D. Gray
- Key Make-up Artist
- Desne Holland
- Special Effects Make-up
- Cannom Creations, Inc.
- Key Hairstylist
- André Blaise
- Main Title Sequence Design
- Imaginary Forces
- Film/Digital Opticals
- Pacific Title/Mirage
- Main/End Title Opticals
- Custom Film Effects
- Conductor
- Bill Stromberg
- Orchestrator
- Tony Blondal
- Additional Orchestration
- Kerry Wikstrom
- Music Supervisor
- Frankie Pine
- Music Editor
- Nick South
- Additional Music Editing
- James Flamberg
- Tod Holcomb
- Recordist/Mixer
- Tim Boyle
- Soundtrack
- "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que séra, séra)" (1) - Pink Martini, (2) - Jula
- De Palma; "Slowly" - Ann-Margret; "I Won't Be Home No More" - Hank Williams; "Lady Shave" - Gus Gus; "Just a Touch of Love" - Slave; "Little Lovey Dovey" - Texas Joe; "Double Cross", "Skunk Walk" - Sugarman 3; "Don't You Know" - Della Reese; "Poor Little Fool" - Rick Nelson; "The Cattle Call" - Eddy Arnold; "Cold Morning" - Kitty Kat Stew; "If U Don't Want None" - Suga T; "That Lonesome Moon" - Willow Creek; "Cuando me quieres" - Frankie
- Sound Design
- Lance Brown
- Sound Mixer
- Felipe Borrero
- Re-recording Mixers
- Chris David
- Lance Brown
- Recordist
- Eddie Bydalek
- Re-recording Engineer
- Michael A. Morongell
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Richard E. Yawn
- Sound Editors
- Steve Mann
- Steve Nelson
- Robert Troy
- Donald L. Warner Jr
- Bernard Weiser
- Aaron D. Weisblatt
- ADR
- Recordists:
- Thor Benitez
- Chris Staszak
- Mixers:
- Eric Thompson
- Shawn Kennelly
- Supervising Editor:
- Becky Sullivan
- Foley
- Artists:
- Joan Rowe
- Sean Rowe
- Mixers:
- Eric Thompson
- Shawn Kennelly
- Supervising Editor:
- Bob Beher
- Soap Opera Technical Adviser
- Shelly Curtis
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Charlie Brewer
- Cast
- Morgan Freeman
- Charlie
- Renée Zellweger
- Betty Sizemore
- Chris Rock
- Wesley
- Greg Kinnear
- Doctor David Ravell/ George McCord
- Aaron Eckhart
- Del Sizemore
- Tia Texada
- Rosa Herrera
- Crispin Glover
- Roy Ostrey
- Pruitt Taylor Vince
- Sheriff Eldon Ballard
- Allison Janney
- Lyla
- Kathleen Wilhoite
- Sue Ann
- Elizabeth Mitchell
- Chloe
- Susan Barnes
- Darlene
- Harriet Sansom Harris
- Ellen
- Sung Hi Lee
- Jasmine
- Laird MacIntosh
- Dr Lonnie Walsh
- Steven Gilborn
- Blake
- Jenny Gago
- Mercedes
- Sheila Kelley
- Joyce
- Matthew Cowles
- Merle
- Wayne Tippit
- doctor
- George D. Wallace
- grandfather
- Lesley Woods
- grandmother
- Cynthia Martells
- chief nurse
- Alfonso Freeman
- ER doctor
- Kevin Rahm
- friend 1
- Steven Culp
- friend 2
- Deborah May
- Gloria Wlash
- Michael Murphy
- studio guard
- Tina Smith
- waitress
- Mike Kennedy
- cook
- Irene Olga López
- Rosa's mother
- Steve Franken
- administrator
- Kelwin Hagen
- deputy
- Joshua Dotson
- parking valet
- Dona Hardy
- woman patient
- Paul Threlkeld
- grip
- José Vasquez
- gang member
- Jack Jacobson
- stagehand
- Elaine Corral-Kendall
- anchor
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Pathé Distribution
- 9,896 feet
- 109 minutes 58 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS
- Colour by
- Technicolor
- 2.35:1 [Super 35]