Nurse Betty

This movie is odd. Not odd in the sense that it is hard for me to make my mind up about it. That aspect is simple: it gambles on some bold choices, none of which come up winners. Rather, the movie is odd in that its subject matter and execution is so strange. It’s oddities also don’t seem purposeful. It isn’t otherworldly weird, like The Big Empty, or symbolically surrealist, like Holy Mountain, it is just plain old odd. The closest thing I can compare it to is someone trying, and failing, to replicate the Coen brother’s brand of bizarre and blackly humorous stories of every-day folk in extraordinary circumstances.

The movie’s plot centers around two parallel stories branching from the same inciting event. Two mob fixers, Charlie and Wesley, come to a small town in order to hunt down a load of stolen drugs and end up killing the man responsible while attempting to interrogate him for information on the whereabouts of the illicit goods. The first story deals with the man’s wife, a Midwestern housewife named Betty who uses soap operas as her escape from her humdrum job and lout of a husband. After witnessing her husband’s violent murder from hiding, she suffers a psychotic break and leaves for Los Angeles, now believing she is a character in her favorite TV show. The second story deals with the fixers who are chasing her down after discovering the missing drugs are in the car she took when she left town. In both cases, the central theme is delusion.

Betty retreats into a broken mental state where fantasy and reality blur, driving halfway across the country because she is in love with a fictional character. Her story is of overt delusion. Charlie’s is much more subtle. His obsession with finding her has him building her up more and more in his mind until he begins falling in love with the idea of her, despite the fact they’ve barely met. As a structure, this is certainly clever, and provides some commentary on the different ways in which people let the fact that they are the hero of their own story distort the way they see the world.

Where the movie gets tricky is in its tone. It sets itself up as a semi-absurdist comedy. The premise is ridiculous. The characters are unusual. Many of the archetypal concepts are played against expectation for comedic effect. However, the movie didn’t really make me laugh nor did it seem like that was its primary goal. It seems more interested in making the audience cringe than giggle. Betty in particular, given the severity of her condition, provides ample opportunity to recoil at the awkwardness with which her fantasy clashes with reality.

It also made me uncomfortable the extent to which everyone in the movie seems totally willing to indulge, or even facilitate, Betty’s delusions. Only a small number of characters recognize that something is off about her and none of them suggest that she seek help for her condition. In fact, the whole movie hinges on a series of people essentially playing along with someone who is obviously not well, which damages the suspension of disbelief necessary to stay invested in the film’s out-there premise. The only time it is done right is when, after arriving in LA, a comedy of errors has her behavior mistaken for a commitment to method acting. Even then, this setup is stretched beyond the point where it normally would have been recognized, playing the gag several minutes longer than makes sense.

All in all, I don’t think Nurse Betty is a very good movie. It takes a sensitive topic and doesn’t handle it in a very sensitive way. With the right execution, this could still have been OK. Not every movie about mental illness has to be as heavy as A Beautiful Mind or The Soloist. However, if a film is going to take a more irreverent tone, it needs to at least be insightful and funny, like Silver Linings Playbook. Nurse Betty simply isn’t funny enough, thoughtful enough, or well made enough to cover for the bold direction it takes in its exploration of how people delude themselves.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in experiencing something akin to a Coen brothers movie made by someone significantly less talented.

Would Not Recommend: If cringe humor targeting the mentally ill is the kind of punching down in comedy you can’t stomach.