Neil LaBute’s first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours, were the blackest of black comedies – labyrinths of sexual betrayal that showed men and women (but particularly men) at their lowest and nastiest. His new film, Nurse Betty, has a different tone altogether; it is offbeat and edged with darkness, but is lighter, sweeter and gentler than one might have expected.
The reason for this is that Nurse Betty is not based on one of LaBute’s own scripts. He was a noted playwright before he became a film-maker, so when he did he was very much a writer-director, a Woody Allen without the softening compassion for human foible; he’s much less of a mensch than Allen. That LaBute has chosen, for his third movie, to direct a script by others – John C Richards and James Flamberg – is an interesting move, and a very successful one. Nurse Betty is the kind of film that leaves you grinning; it is thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, without making you feel your pleasures are the slightly guilty ones of having slummed it in the gutters of near-idiocy that often pass for American comedy.
Renée Zellweger plays Betty Sizemore, a waitress (or waitron, as we are apparently supposed to say nowadays) in a small Kansas town. She is married to a philandering car salesman (Aaron Eckhart, a LaBute regular), suppressing her pain at her foiled dreams by investing emotionally in a hospital soap opera called A Reason to Love.
When hubby Del runs foul of two hitmen (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock), Betty goes into a state of “dissociative fugue”. This is not an invention of the scriptwriters: psychiatrists and psychologists were consulted on this condition, in which, following trauma, a person simply refuses to accept reality as it is and goes instead for a more comforting fantasy; it’s the ultimate form of denial, a kind of creative denial. You could make a sterling political satire out of this idea, especially in Southern Africa, but in Betty’s case it means rushing off to California to find the man she believes to be her former fiancé, Dr David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), one of the lead characters in A Reason to Love. As far as Betty is concerned, heÃ-s as real as anyone else around her, perhaps more so.
What follows from this is both highly amusing and rather heart-warming. Zellweger wins our affection for Betty as effortlessly as Eckhart had alienated it, and the rest of the cast – Freeman especially, who has a marvellous depth, even when playing for laughs – support the whole project admirably.
LaBute’s filmic style here is subtle, more fluid and nuanced than the often head-on, unblinkingly direct camerawork he applied to his own dark scripts. The washed-out colours of Betty’s life in Kansas give way to the more vibrant hues of California as she heads for her personal Oz and the necessary confrontations with her good and bad demons. And you’re with her all the way.