Nurse Betty Rating: 87/100

This movie completely surprised me from the outset. I am not sure what I was expecting but I believe that this one suffered from the same bad trailers that some other sleepers did (compare the bad original trailer of Strange Days with the Sci-Fi channel's awesome TV spot). In fact, since this DVD didn't include the theatrical trailer, I had to go watch the one online to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating the first time around. As I expected, the trailer was a bit shallow and really didn't give enough flavor for the type of movie that this is, an engrossed psychological dark comedy that succeeds on all levels.

The movie stars Renee Zellweger as a repressed Midwest waitress, married to an unfaithful abusive husband. In the past she had aspired to become a nurse, but her dream seems farther away with each passing day. Her only escape is her favorite TV soap opera, "A Reason to Love", and she has an absorbed crush on its main character "Dr. Drake Ravel" played by Greg Kinnear. After a personal trauma, her reality and that of the soap opera become entangled and she sets out to be with the love of her life. This is about all of the plot that you should know, because the movie is a true mind twister and needs to be discovered as you watch it. Morgan Freeman plays Charlie a close to retirement bagman/hitman, and Chris Rock plays Wesley, his over enthusiastic, creatively sadistic protégé. They follow Betty across the country to retrieve certain property that they believe she has stolen.

This movie is skillful at pitting each character's perception against reality and shows us how easy it is to distort facts based on our own past experience. It combines some hard hitting scenes with some comedic ones that give the viewer a chance to catch a breath at the same time the characters do, though it never removes the approaching collision in the film. The tone of the film gives you this underlying uneasy feeling because reality is not far below the surface for any of the characters, though each fails to see it. Zellweger carries the movie with her innocence and charm, and Freeman and Rock provide solid support, and are a perfect marriage of comedy, character depth and dynamics. Freeman's Charlie is by far the most complex character, and causes much of the uneasiness of the film especially when the two meet for the second time. The rest of the supporting cast (Greg Kinnear, Allison Janney, Crispin Glover, Tia Texada) provide just enough of the surface realism to keep that crispy edge to the whole movie.

Although the DVD lacks the trailer (a decision that I wonder about sometimes, when the trailer doesn't represent the film enough), it has some great deleted scenes, some of which easily could have stayed in the movie. One scene includes Chris MacDonald as a southern dealer of sorts, who has a clash of ideology with Charlie and Wesley. Another explains much more about the thoughts that are buzzing around Charlie's head as he attempts to "profile" Betty in order to find her. The last deleted scene was one that was a bit of gratuitous violence that the movie didn't need (and subsequently was a good edit). The subtitles provided are in Spanish and English and capture the meat of the dialogue.

This movie is a strong rental, and depending on your taste for dark comedies, may be worth the purchase.

Brian Murphy