Journal of American Studies of Turkey

13 (2001): 89-90

Film Review

Neil LaBute: Nurse Betty (2000)

Michael Oppermann

From time to time Hollywood seems to produce films that deliberately defy the limitations of conventional narrative cinema. Critics tend to label them as “offbeat” or even “postmodern” because of their subversive play with traditional genres, narrative patterns and our concept of identity. The works of the Coen Brothers immediately come to mind as examples of films totally “off the beaten track.” Neil LaBute`s Nurse Betty, however, ranks along their finest works. It is a highly interesting and unusual contribution to contemporary cinema in spite of a plot that, initially, sounds more than familiar.

Betty has spent all her life in Fair Oaks, Kansas. She is a waitress married to a rather callous car dealer who betrays her all the time. In short, her marriage is characterized by a striking absence of care and emotion. However, change is on the way because her husband (trying to be clever) has apparently tried to double-cross a cartel of drug dealers. Two killers (Forest Whitaker and Chris Rock as his young apprentice) maltreat him in such a gruesome way that Betty escapes from Fair Oaks, speeding away in her husband`s car. Leaving the “flatlands” of Kansas for the first time, she is now on the way to the Grand Canyon, the dream of her life. What she doesn`t know, however, is that she has several kilos of cocaine in her trunk that her husband tried to hide. For this reason, she is being chased by an incredible number of people, the sheriff of Fair Oaks and a reporter being among them. Unfortunately, though, the two killers are also on her trail.

What sounds like the overture to a solid road movie full of action quickly turns into a pretext to a film that successfully crosses all genres. While Betty approaches the Grand Canyon, a voice within tells her that her name should be Dorothy (the girl from Kansas who was blown by a hurricane into the fairy tale country of The Wizard of Oz, and who sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow”). The process of transformation continues when she gradually becomes convinced to be the ex-fiancee of a highly handsome chiropractic from a soap opera (her dream lover apparently because she had already tried to follow his series regularly when working as a waitress). He is her “Reason to Love”, to quote the title of the series. “Love is waiting somewhere out there,” his voice whispers and Betty believes him. She is set on finding the love of her life who is supposed to live in Los Angeles. So from now on Betty becomes part of an imaginary world, part of a soap opera. The series becomes her “Reason to live”. Betty, who is characterized both by her frank and stunning naivety and by a strange kind of duckwalk, is a fearless dreamer, a “Traumgängerin” (dream walker) who has decided to reside in a reality of her own. It is the sheer goodness and uprightness of her heart that make her totally immune against irony and all signs and insinuations that her world is not real. For her it has become reality, and the film`s skillful direction manages to establish Betty`s specific way of “being”, in the existential sense of the German “Sein”, as a totally natural disposition in life. In the end, even the two killers prove to be “samurais” in spirit; they spare Betty`s life, unable to kill this charming and totally innocent human being.

Nurse Betty is an intelligent and extremely sublime crosswalk on the borders of dream and reality. The film establishes its director Neil LaBute (who has hitherto been known as the author of an extremely grim play called Bash, a dark study into the banality of murder, and an equally dark shoestring film debut called In The Company of Men from 1996) as one of Hollywood`s most outstanding directors. The film is marked by a subtle kind of humor and a sophisticated play with the conventions of the soap opera genre, which, in a fairly ironical twist, are established as the prime reality. The film`s real winning card is Rene Zellweger, though, who manages to play Betty`s part with such charm and conviction that even the most critical viewer has to agree with her that chiropractics are among the most handsome of men.