Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty

Nurse Betty Directed by Neil LaBute

On paper, it sure sounds dreadful, and, for a while, it plays mostly dreadful: a Kansas coffeeshop waitress (Renee Zellweger), who's obsessed with a daytime hospital soap opera, becomes unhinged after seeing two hitmen murder her slimy car-dealer husband (Aaron Eckhart), flees her small Kansas town and road trips to Hollywood to meet and marry her favorite hunky doctor on the aforementioned soap. No, not the actor who plays the doctor (that would be Greg Kinnear), but the actual doctor. In other words, the poor girl is either so traumatized or so innocent/dumb that she can't tell the difference between reality and fiction. As she moves west, she's tailed by the two hitmen (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock), a mentor-pupil team whose propensity for icy violence is exceeded only by their fondness for self-aware wisecracks and philosophical observations.

So you're looking, on paper, at a kind of encyclopedia of indie film cliches. Every major character is a variation on a stereotype, and some of them are so familiar by now that I might be persuaded to abandon my staunch support of First Amendment protection and support federal legislation to declare an indefinite moratorium on seeing any of them in a movie for at least 10 years. There's the wide-eyed small-town girl going to the big city (she's from Kansas?just like Dorothy, get it?), armored only by her willful innocence; the aformentioned philosophical hitmen, who are very 1994; the ignorant, macho, cluelessly sociopathic used-car dealer who's banging his secretary and getting mixed up with criminals; also an endearing but clueless small-town cop, an endearing but clueless small-town reporter and a couple of skeptical but good-hearted best pals for the heroine, one back home in Kansas, the other acquired upon arrival in the big, bad city.

So Nurse Betty is another movie in the Blue Velvet-Something Wild-Pulp Fiction-Clay Pigeons mode, mixing philosophy, violence, self-conscious romanticism and I-went-to-college film references in equal measure. Writers John C. Richards and James Flamberg won the best-screenplay award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which, on the surface, would seem to confirm some people's worst fears; we're talking about a festival so permeated by fans of American junk culture that it gave its top prize in 1990 to Wild at Heart, another movie full of brutality, condescension toward small towns and Wizard of Oz references.

Then there is what I'll call, for lack of a more pointed term, the LaBute problem. The writer-director's first two films, In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors, were provocative and well-acted, but they struck a lot of people as stridently false and obviously contrived for effect. I found their pervasive misanthropy so overpowering that I literally couldn't believe a frame of either movie; compared to LaBute, David Mamet is Frank Capra. Like Todd Solondz in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness?but without Solondz's frequent spasms of seemingly uncontrollable empathy?LaBute appeared to take a cruel delight in creating clingy, damaged, neurotic women and variously wimpy and brutal men and pitting them against each other. He was like a kid putting bugs in a jar to watch them fight. Jason Patric's character in Your Friends & Neighbors was a praying mantis?a cartoon praying mantis. His big monologue about raping a boy in high school and digging it still ranks as the single most unbelievable, faux-powerful monologue in recent movie memory. Even more unbelievable was the reaction of the male characters listening to the creep's nostalgic remembrance: only in Neil LaBute films do law-abiding yuppies hear a rape story delivered with icy pride, then refrain from passing judgment and continue to associate with the rapist.

How to account, then, for the many pleasures of Nurse Betty? I can't speak for anybody who loves the first part of the movie, which presents small-town life with the same Mayberry R.F.D. condescension as most indies with small-town characters. LaBute confirms the yokelism of Betty and her husband Del by showing them having a conversation while chewing with their mouths open. Then Del absentmindedly takes a big bite of the celebratory cupcake Betty's coffee-shop coworkers gave her to celebrate her birthday; he doesn't even notice there's a candle in it. The unsurprisingly excellent Morgan Freeman and the untutored but amusing Chris Rock have a lot of fun together?they're like a tennis pro and his amateur cousin hitting a ball around. You've seen this loquacious hitman stuff so many times before that at first it's hard to get into it, and though the material becomes more watchable and funny, thanks to Freeman and Rock's chemistry, I never shook the feeling that it was shoehorned into Nurse Betty to impart a fake sense of jeopardy to the proceedings. And the hitmen's explosively savage torture and murder of Del is all wrong. Though obviously meant to tell the audience, "All bets are off," it only confirms LaBute's willingness to do whatever it takes to get a rise out of people, even if his choices are tonally inconsistent with everything else in the movie.

When Betty arrives in Los Angeles and improbably gets a nursing job at the hospital that serves as the facade for her favorite soap, A Reason to Love, the movie is on the rails. All the elements that felt either incompatible or just plain regrettable mix together, setting off comedic chain reactions like randomly mixed substances from a chemistry set. The seeming incompatibility of Neil LaBute and innocence amounts to yet another irresolvable but ultimately beneficial combination; it's as if James L. Brooks had directed a David Lynch movie, or vice versa.

The heart of the film is an exploration of the ways that life and popular culture intersect with and then pollute each other. One could argue that LaBute and the screenwriters might have made more cogent, credible points if the world outside Hollywood?indeed, the world not seen on television?had been populated with more realistic characters, rather than, say, moony-eyed coffee-shop waitresses and philosophical hitmen. But what happens after Betty hits Hollywood is so enjoyable in so many ways that I didn't really mind that the film makes a muddle of the art/life issue. As in Pulp Fiction, much of the fun comes from the sight of good actors doing wonderful work in roles that seem, on paper, to be pretty much unplayable; and, as in Tarantino's postmodern gangster opus, the act of assuming a role ("Let's get into character," says Vincent Vega) becomes the invisible motor driving the film's narrative engine.

Betty?known upon her arrival in Los Angeles as Nurse Betty?starts the film in the role of housewife and waitress and small-town innocent, then, after the shock of seeing her husband's murder, assumes the role of a nomadic, nutty, bromide-spouting stalker. She plays the role with such spooky focus that when she does meet the object of her desire, actor George McCord (Kinnear), he and his entourage mistake her for an actress stuck in some kind of extended method improvisation. McCord, who makes his living doing acting that the film deems unserious, sees Betty not just as an attractive young woman, but as a magnetic force who draws out the true actor he's been hiding during all those years of soap-opera success. Their scenes together?charged with the promise of love and sex?amount to extended improvisations on the notion of improvisation. They're also a critique of the idea that we could even have fixed identities. Aren't we all, the film asks, just actors?

Maybe that's what LaBute is really interested in, the thing that perhaps unconsciously drew him to this material: his interest in actors and acting. Whether you like his other films or not, you might be willing to concede that they at least offer strange and challenging parts for performers who aren't thought of as big stars, and who give off such weird energy and pursue their craft with such singlemindedness that they may never become big stars.

Nurse Betty is full of actors who fit that description. Crispin Glover exudes his usual elfin oddness as the small-town reporter; Pruitt Taylor Vince is pure defanged pomposity as the cop; Tia Texada brings a lived-in authority to the thankless part of Betty's Los Angeles pal and unofficial guide through the urban wilderness. Kinnear is funny and sweet but also much more supple and complex than in previous screen outings. Allison Janney?who's been so good in so many things over the past few years that her name might soon be preceded by "the great"?is a hoot as the soap's powerful and controlling head writer; she listens to other actors with such alertness and bemusement that you laugh just looking at her. Eckhart is handsome and sexy, but he's irresistibly drawn to parts that ugly him up (physically and sometimes morally). That makes him the ideal LaBute actor?the De Niro to the Mormon Scorsese.

The real stunner here is Zellweger, who's so good that she might torpedo my theory about LaBute's movies being populated by people who are too good or interesting to be made stars. Though I normally shy away from Academy Awards prognostications, I must say I think she's an early lock for a Best Actress Oscar?provided Academy voters aren't turned off by the movie and the character. Though it's conceivable that another actress could have done fine work as Betty?Amy Brenneman or Lili Taylor spring to mind?nobody else in movies has Zellweger's mix of sincerity and looniness. Cameron Crowe said he cast her in Jerry Maguire because she reminded him of Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. I can see that; she's very MacLaine-ish here, too. At other points, her exceedingly strange brand of innocence suggests, by turns, Diane Keaton, Sandy Dennis and Betty Hutton. Yet the sum total is wholly original. There's nothing arch or ironic about this performance; she's deep inside this damaged young woman's flower-scented brain from frame one, and she never steps outside. She makes Betty's innocence as shiny, impenetrable, multifaceted and sharp as the face of a freshly cut diamond. The light?meaning the attentions of the camera and her costars?is refracted through her acting in ways that never fail to surprise. In the most unplayable part in a film full of unplayable parts, she's completely natural. If you saw her on the street after watching Nurse Betty, you might be tempted to ask her if she misses Kansas.