NRO Weekend, September 16-17, 2000
In Praise of Betty, Barely
Renee Zellwegger saves the latest from Neil Labute.

By Matthew Feeney-----------------MatthewFeeney@msn.com

hen Neil Labute made In the Company of Men, which centered around a cruel trick played on a deaf woman by male coworkers, critics took him to be some kind of feminist. His second movie, Your Friends and Neighbors, revealed him to be a different sort of moralist. His characters embodied a handful of vices, in some distinctly ugly combinations, understood according to a surprisingly traditional moral code (Mormonism, as it happens).

This approach places a tremendous burden on actors, because Labute — in portraying the disastrous results of his overeducated characters' casual immorality — points a damning finger squarely at the hip urban types who go to see challenging little films of the sort he makes. If the actors cannot show a glimmer of redeemable humanity from beneath the meanness that veils their characters, or if they take their characters' ugliness as license to engage in garish acting exercises, then the overall effect on the audience is dismal.

Even though Labute did not write the screenplay for Nurse Betty, and even though the movie is more selectively moralizing than its immediate predecessor, it places a similar burden on its actors by forcing them to credibly inhabit a world fashioned out of delusion, fantasy, and sad, bloody reality. Thanks to a performance by Renee Zellwegger that contains enough charm to sustain a dozen Neil Labute movies, Nurse Betty succeeds — but, because a couple off-key turns by other actors, not as well as it might have.

Zellwegger plays Betty, a Kansas diner waitress who daydreams about the star (Greg Kinnear) of her favorite soap opera, A Reason to Love, as she slogs through her unhappy life. One evening she witnesses the ghastly murder of her brutish husband Del, whose character defects apparently include a weakness for ripping off people much nastier than he is. When questioned later, she responds with a sunny attitude of complete denial, which a psychiatrist identifies as a post-traumatic breakdown.

One of the strengths of the screenplay is the way it unveils the exact nature of Betty's denial, whether she is just ashamedly happy that her despicable husband met a grisly end, or whether she has actually taken leave of a reality she wasn't all that fond of from the start.

Followed by her husband's killers, Betty sets off on a strange trip to Hollywood. The older of the killers (Morgan Freeman), whose outlook at first has been nurtured exclusively in the cruel world, begins his own struggle with reality, much to the irritation of his partner (Chris Rock). The film moves between Betty's pursuit of her Hollywood fantasy and the killers' pursuit of Betty.

Aside from one hilariously inappropriate stare, Rock is a liability. His exaggerated swagger and staccato delivery suit his brilliant stand-up material and over-the-top sketches on his HBO show, but they work poorly alongside a naturalistic actor like Morgan Freeman. Rock draws Freeman into an uncharacteristic stridency, which is then hard to reconcile with Freeman's ascent into dreaminess. Their scenes together are sometimes funny, but mostly dissonant.

Their interplay seems especially wooden in contrast to that of Zellweger and Kinnear. Because of the movie-ish unreality that Betty's mental state imposes on the already artificial world of her beloved soap star, their scenes are extremely precarious. They could easily slide into kitsch or mockery. Indeed, they should be patently unbelievable, but Zellweger portrays Betty as a wounded character who yearns, a combination that is utterly riveting.

The spell that she casts over the stars and writers of A Reason to Love, she casts over the audience as well. Finally, Betty's psychological reckoning is one of the most heartbreaking bits of acting I've seen in a long time. Zellweger plays it not as a moment of epiphany, but of remorse and muted shame.

Labute avoids the mistake of ogling Zellwegger's cuteness, a mistake that Cameron Crowe made in Jerry Maguire. Zellwegger's watery, squinty eyes twinkle enough without heart-tugging close-ups every other minute. Labute's restraint allows Zellweger to get away with several moments of comic mugging that, in the hands of a more indulgent (or smitten) director, would have been too precious. Instead, they come off as winning and slyly funny.

The script allows Labute to get his licks in, too. Betty's delusions are meant to express truths so obvious that only Hollywood types can fail to see them. Perhaps actors are too easy a target, but Kinnear is a game fall-guy, and Zellweger's Betty is a far gentler messenger than Labute is himself.