Neil LaBute Lightens Up With Nurse Betty -- Almost

Dateline: 09/05/00

I always feel a little dirty after a watch a film by Neil LaBute. Dirty and dissatisfied, and perhaps even angry that I just wasted my valuable time sitting in a dark theater watching despicable people do despicable things. Trademark characters in a LaBute's film are good-looking, manipulative, shallow, and cruel. Always cruel. If these people represent humanity, then let me tell you, I want out.

It looks like audiences are in for a pleasant change with LaBute's third film, Nurse Betty. Opening on Friday, September 8, the film stars the always delightful Renée Zellweger as the title character Betty, a waitress at the local diner in a small Kansas town. She dreams every day of her true love: he appears as a doctor (Greg Kinnear) on her favorite soap opera. When her husband is killed in a drug deal gone wrong, Betty flees reality and drives cross-country to Los Angeles in the hopes of meeting her soap opera fantasy face to face. Followed by the hit men who killed her husband, Betty arrives in the City of Angels and eventually meets her dream doctor.

Nurse Betty marks the first time LaBute has directed from another writer's script. (The screenplay, by the way, the first for John C. Richards and James Flamberg, won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival 2000.) LaBute, a graduate of Brigham Young University, is a also playwright; the theatrical quality of his previous films In the Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) is unmistakable. The plots are heavy on dialogue; the cinematography and locations are simple, much like the constraints of the stage. Nurse Betty takes LaBute into welcome new territory: action, landscape, and easy laughs. LaBute is free to let loose, taking us on a madcap road trip as popular comedian Chris Rock and acclaimed actor Morgan Freeman, a hilarious father-son hit squad, follow the hapless Betty across the country.

Page Two: "Let's hurt somebody."