Cast (in credits order) verified as complete
Nurse Betty Movie Trailer
Nurse Betty (2000) Trailer
Nurse Betty Full Movie Description
In Nurse Betty Movie This is a sleeper, a dark comedy with enough inventive twists to call to mind The Truman Show but with a greater sense of reality to hold it down.
Renee Zellweger is flawless as the naive, sweet, but utterly detached young woman named Betty who is addicted to a soap opera called "A Reason to Love."
This seems sweet enough, but her husband is a jerk (totally) and things start to spiral, and get dizzy, as reality even for the viewer starts to shift ground.
Not that you are ever confused about what is happening or who the good guys are. The good guys are not Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock, for sure, as this unlikely and comedic father and son duo get involved, incidentally at first, in Betty's strange inner and outer life.
A chase of sorts ensues, the soap opera becomes reality, and then reality becomes soap opera. And it's really hilarious and inventive and fast paced.
Is it a total work of genius? Probably not. Maybe Charlie Kaufman would have added another twist in there (I'm not sure how), and certainly some of the side characters could have seemed less cardboard, or less awkward as actors.
But Zellweger is unbelievable (really, your jaw might drop at how convincing she could play her mental blindness, and her awakening, of sorts). And Morgan Freeman is his usually convincing and engaging self.
The utterly disgusting violence of one 20 second scene might turn off some viewers near the beginning, but if you can keep watching, the movie gets better from there. Much better.
This is an adorable, if somewhat edgy, comedy from a clever and witty script by John C. Richards, crisply directed by the very talented Neil LaBute, proving that he can handle comedy just as adroitly as he can the art house movie.
Renée Zellweger stars as Betty Sizemore, a sort of Doris Day of the 21st century, a waitress from Kansas whose fantasy life centers around Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), star of a TV soap opera called, "A Reason to Live," to such a fanatical degree that she has memorized lines from the show after watching the tapes over and over again. (This will come in handy later on.)
Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock play a father-son team of cocaine-dealing hit men who ignite the premise of the movie by murdering Betty's slimy used car salesman husband, played by Aaron Eckhart, who starred in In the Company of Men (1997), also directed by Neil LaBute.
Chris Rock is a comedic psychopath, and Freeman a fatherly murderer whose favorite dictum is "three in the head, you know they're dead."
One of the amazing and characteristic things about Morgan Freeman is that even while playing a professional criminal, he manages to sound like the wisest, gentlest man you ever knew.
True, the plot relies heavily on co-incidence (Betty copping the keys to the Buick that just happens to have the goods in the trunk), precise timing (meeting Dr. David and entourage at exactly the right moment), and some questionable psychology (Betty's partial and convenient amnesia).
But such contrivances should be written off as poetic license and ignored. After all, who would criticize Shakespeare for the tortured plots of his comedies? More significantly, what makes this work is the cleverness of the plot melded well with the personalities of the characters (while gently satirizing them), and some very funny dialogue.
My favorite line is when Freeman, looking gravely at a picture of the disappeared little miss Nurse Betty Movie, soberly remarks to Rock, "We may be dealing with a cunning, ruthless woman here."
I wonder, could it be that some of the pseudonymous (and humorless) reviewers who trashed this movie here and at IMDb are jealous, out-of-work screen writers?
An observation and a question: Renée Zellweger has the kind of on-screen presence to delight the most jagged heart.
And who really is the reigning queen of contemporary filmland comedy, Zellweger or Reese Witherspoon? They are both brilliant. Witherspoon is a little more over the top while Zellweger is more impish.
It would be interesting to see them trade roles, say, Zellweger as goody-goody A-student Tracy Flick in Election (1999) and Witherspoon as Nurse Betty Movie. Too bad something like that can't be done.
Incidentally, the song, "Ca Sera, Sera" heard in the background won an academy award for best song in the Hitchcock thriller, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring James Stewart and Doris Day.
The reason it reappears here is not entirely clear, but the resemblance of the wonderfully naive Nurse Betty Full Movie to the on- and off-screen Doris Day (who also had a hit recording of "Ca Sera, Sera,") goes beyond the strawberry blond hair to a kind of irrepressible innocence.
In Nurse Betty Full Movie, however, the Doris Day world of white picket fences and monogamy is given a contemporary spin. Although this is to some extent a romantic comedy, it is one in which the answer to the question, Who gets the girl? is one never seen in a Doris Day flick.
The Bad: The gimmick in this movie, as with so many, is the opposite. This time there is a well-used contrast between mindless brutality and open, honest innocence.
What is new is the culmination of extremes. Violence is a new extreme in this context. How much more can we increase? Is our own innocence so permanently numbed?
The Good: This film is remarkably sophisticated in its self-referential layering. This is an indicator that the level of general intelligence, at least in the US, is increasing in this category. It requires real abstract thinking to appreciate, and one imagines an audience in the '80s would be completely perplexed.
Simple films with dramatic self-reference usually mix real life with a play within a play. "Shakespeare in Love" and "Illuminata" are similar.
Real life within the drama as "The Truman Show" is a bit more complicated. But here we have a new and lovely development, six layers of self-reference.
We have the real-life Renee and the layering of her film character. I have no doubt that the marketing of Renee as the new America's Sweetheart is the real foundation of this effort.
So Renee is playing Public Renee. Then we have Renee playing Betty. We believe that all three together are real. But it has been common since 75 years.
What's New Betty is becoming "Nurse Betty Movie". Another layer, and then full circle as the "real" Nurse Betty becomes pretend Nurse Betty. This is supposed to be the last one before it actually happens.
Finally, we have Freeman's fantasy fairy Betty, who we believe is the root of all the mixed layers. This makes six layers by my count. Think about it: This movie requires a sophisticated viewer. As this is likely to be a huge hit, that sophistication should be present in the masses. Astonishing!
Coincidentally, only two people can star in this movie and one isn't Chris Rock. What's with this guy?
As Betty Sizemore (Renée Zellweger) secretly witnesses her tyrannical husband Dale (Aaron Eckhart) murdered by vengeful hitmen Charlie and Wesley (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock), her buried sense of reality echoes the fantasy world of her favorite soap.
I get completely immersed. Opera. In complete denial and confusion, Betty physically and mentally withdraws from her disenfranchised, small-town life in search of "Dr. David Revell" (Greg Kinnear), the handsome and endearing protagonist of "A Reason to Love".
runs away for Soap opera set in a hospital and produced in Los Angeles. Freed from reality, Betty arrives in LA and becomes "Nurse Betty Full Movie" as she tries to live in the hospital world of her dream boyfriend.
Meanwhile, an angry Charlie and Wesley track down Betty, convinced she is a dangerous witness who also knows about her compromising dealings with Dale.
Nurse Betty Film contrasts her main character's extreme innocence and optimism with the apparent hypocrisy and violence that surrounds her, creating comedy and suspense.
By clearly defining the protagonist's difficult life, Nurse Betty Movie justifies her character's tendency to run away from reality.
Thus, while offering a comment about the popularity of soap operas within the film, Nurse Betty Film also makes a comment about the widespread addiction to television and its celebrities.
Furthermore, Nurse Betty Full Movie benefits from effective manipulation of her protagonist's mental state, particularly in scenes where she cannot differentiate between the character "Dr. David Revell" and the actor playing her, George McCord (Greg Kinnear). Is. Betty's inability to recognize George as an actor leads to awkward misunderstandings, emphasizing the magnitude of her delusional state.
However, despite these successes, Nurse Betty Film suffers from the troubling characterization through which the narrative develops.
For example, while Charlie and Wesley are consistently portrayed as a comical pair, the brutality of their actions undermines any sense of admiration or acceptance initially experienced by the audience.
Similarly, although the early scenes establish Dale as a detestable figure, the humiliation and violence he experiences with his killers goes beyond the humiliation and violence he caused his wife Betty.
Finally, towards the end of the film, Charlie undergoes strange changes as he develops an obsession for Betty; A passion that results in great feelings of love, and which ultimately destroys him.
As a result, the characters' roles as victims lack continuity, so the story's victimization process feels random and pointless. Overall, Nurse Betty's precociousness - rather than creating suspense - weakens its characters and pollutes its plot.