Don't listen to the negative reviews

The first must-see film of the year.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Released in 2000, "Nurse Betty" stars Renée Zellweger as Betty, a lowly waitress married to a total jerk. She watches her favorite soap and fantasies about the hero-doctor on the show (Greg Kinnear). Meanwhile Morgan Freeman plays Charlie, the leader of a criminal duo (the other played by Chris Rock); as they chase the woman from Kansas to Los Angeles Charlie ends-up falling in love with her even though he's never met her.This is part dramedy, part road movie, part crime drama, part romcom and part black comedy. While it's rarely laugh-out loud, it's pretty consistently amusing. What throws it off is that it's such an eccentric mixture viewers don't know how to take it, especially when it throws in a fairly radical scalping sequence (and I don't mean scalping tickets). It helps, though, when you grasp that the movie's about Betty and Charlie and their romantic idealism of people they've never met.This is an offbeat movie that's half-good and half-meh. The "meh" reaction is mostly due to its curiosities; it might play better on repeat viewings.The movie runs almost 110 minutes and was shot in Los Angeles; Durango, Colorado; Grand Canyon, Arizona; and Rome, Lazio, Italy (closing scene).GRADE: C+

Betty (Renée Zellweger) is a Kansas diner waitress obsessed with the soap opera 'A Reason to Love'. Her husband Del (Aaron Eckhart) is a sleazy car salesman cheating on her and selling drugs. She sees him being scalped by criminals Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock) and she goes into shock with delusion of being Nurse Betty on her favorite TV show. She goes to LA to find George McCord (Greg Kinnear) who plays Dr. David Ravell on the show thinking Ravell is her ex-fiancée. Del had stuff the drugs in the car and the two criminals go after her for the drugs.It's a black comedy but none of it struck me as being terribly funny. A graphic scalping can do that to me. It's quirky. I have nothing bad to say about the performances. Zellweger is fully committed to her delusional character. She is definitely suppose to be funny. I keep thinking a different way to get her to the delusion would allow the movie to be much funnier. She could get hit on the head. She could see her husband cheating. Murder and more specifically scalping seems like such an extreme option. It makes Freeman and Rock not funny.

Renee Zellweger is a Kansas housewife whose domineering husband is mixed up in drug trafficking. Two professional hit men -- Morgan Freeman and his son, Chris Rock, murder the husband in his dining room. Zellweger, unobserved by the killers, witnesses this and undergoes a dissociative reaction, assuming the personality of a nurse -- the eponymous Betty -- who is a character in her favorite soap opera. Believing herself to be the TV character, Zellweger takes off in her husband's car, which has a load of dope in the trunk, and travels to LA where she hopes to link up with another character in this mindless afternoon drama, "Dr. David Ravell", Greg Kinnear. Not realizing she is being pursued by the two hit men, she drives to LA where she manages to link up with Kinnear and is actually written into the show as a nurse named Betty. A handful of men in the know, including the local sheriff, catch on to what's happening and also seek Zellweger in LA. The ending is believable and poignant.If that sounds crazy, it's because it is. And it's the writer's responsibility, John C. Richards. The curious thing is that Richards and the director, Neil Labute, with considerable help from the performers, just about pull it all off. This isn't a plot that has been cast in a familiar mold. Nope. I give it bonus points for sheer originality. Somebody went out on a limb. Somebody took a chance on a movie that was NOT a copy or remake of something that had made money ten years or fifty years ago. I imagine the people involved, down on their knees every night, praying fervently. I don't know if the film was remunerative but it's mostly successful on its own aesthetic terms.It's what might be called an "initial premise" movie. You start off with a single transformative event, in this case the murder of Zellweger's husband and her adoption of a genuinely new personality, and follow the resultant logical paths realistically. "Groundhog Day" is another, better and more intricately plotted, example. "Nurse Betty" has its logical cracks, where the incidents give up their plausibility. Eg., at a party in LA, Zellweger finally runs into Kinnear, the guy who plays her ex-fiancé on TV. She's stunned (because, after all, she thinks she's Betty, who lost her fiancé long ago). She approaches Kinnear and a couple of his colleagues and introduces herself as "Nurse Betty", the character. She addresses Kinnear by the name of his TV character, "David Ravell." The group are puzzled at first, then convince themselves that she's an aspiring actress who insists on staying "in character" during the conversation -- and afterward, too, after Kinnear has become fascinated by her and the others bored. Kinnear drives her home and even when she kisses him goodnight, she's still in character, leaving Kinnear wide-eyed with astonishment at the relentless way she captures the character of Betty. On the next date, Kinnear returns her love. That development, the relationship between Zellweger and Kinnear at this point, is a crack in the logic, the kind that's absent from "Groundhog Day." By the end of Night One, Kinnear, like any other person, would realize that Zellweger is a few clowns short of a circus.The rest of the film, which includes many digressions, succeeds beyond expectations. The relationship between Morgan Freeman and his insolent, nihilistic son is marvelously spelled out. Morgan is flawless in his exasperation. He manages to fall in love with the image of Zellweger as he unearths clues to her whereabouts and activities, and at the end he can't bring himself to shoot her. She's too sweet to shoot. After her transformation into Betty, she left a note behind in Kansas. "I want to help all life, whether it be animal, plant, or mineral." Who could harm the author of such a preposterous connative statement? His admiration of her comes as an epiphany, as he stands near one of the floodlights at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Zellweger, dressed as Dorothy, or maybe the Good Witch of the East -- well, characters that, like Zellweger, are from Kansas anyway -- appears to Freeman and he embraces her and kisses her tenderly. It's a scene that's at once eerie, romantic, and a little spooky. I once stood at one of those lights and threw some shredded paper into the updraft from the dark canyon and found myself surrounded by a thousand swirling bats who had misperceived the fluttering shreds as moths.Right. Where was I? Okay. I was trying not to run out of space. Zellweger's performance deserves plaudits. Everything she does, every movement, every utterance, is naive and tentative. She really IS a likable character -- and that despite the fact that she's no glamor girl by Hollywood standards. But -- what an actress. Compare her performance as the bumptious 19th-century hick in "Cold Mountain." Just the opposite. But then everyone is up to snuff in this enjoyable film. Allyson Jannings does a fine job in a minor role. Watch her when she tells Greg Kinnear that she's considering killing off his character in the soap opera in a drowning accident. Kinnear is one of those narcissists who wears the kind of ten-thousand dollar thin black leather jackets that were popular at the time. He chuckles and says, "Oh, one of those castaway deals, right? Okay, how do I get back?" Jannings doesn't answer. She just smiles at him with those enormous blue eyes and tilts her head mockingly.Not a masterpiece of film-making but a good, original, professional job by everyone concerned.

...not in keeping with the otherwise excellent comedic genre of the movie. Amazing how our perceptions of the later work of actors such as Freeman, Zellwegger, Kinnear leave us disconcerted by this mature, edgy indie.True, Zellwegger is cute, Kinnear gorgeous and Freeman (initially) avuncular (when will that Mandela biopic script be ready?), but this piece probes the seedy, exploitative, delusional side of human nature with wincing accuity, whilst staying (net) on the right side of feelgood.Just to be clear: DON'T treat this as a cosy family romcom. Someone will be traumatised and that will spoil an otherwise enriching view.