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- "Nurse Betty"
(Reviewed August 10, 2000)
- Renee Zellweger is absolutely adorable and wonderful, as always, but something is more than a little bit...off...about this movie. The script seems to have been written as a
lightweight little farce that should have been shot as a breezy, fast-moving comedy. But this filmed version is flabby and drawn out and all over the road.
I haven't seen director Neil LaBute's "In
the
Company of Men." All I know about that movie is its log line, and somehow I never could get up for the idea of watching a pair of cruel bastards sexually harass a deaf girl for two hours. (Call me
sensitive.) But I liked his viciously funny second film, "Your Friends and Neighbors," which if nothing else proved that Jason Patric would be the perfect choice to play Jesse Custer if the "Preacher" movie
ever makes it out of development hell.
Why anyone thought the director of those two films would be a good choice to helm an off-kilter little comedy about a naive waitress who wants to live in her
favorite soap opera is beyond me. This should have been a really tight, funny, almost slapstick outing. But in LaBute's hands, it is plodding and even inappropriately violent in places. Renee's character
literally
seems to belong in a different movie (which I suppose works in a thematic sense, but not on the screen).
Still, it does get points for being different, even if "different" in this case means some
bizarre
hybrid of the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino and Garry Marshall. And Renee Zellweger is so natural and beautiful and perfect that you just can't help falling in love with her. (Did I mention that I like her
a
lot?)
Back Row Grade: C, because Renee is simply irresistible in just about anything.
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