Nurse Betty

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Nurse Betty
DVD cover for Nurse Betty
Directed by	Neil LaBute
Produced by	Steve Golin
Written by	John C. Richards
Starring	Renée Zellweger Morgan Freeman Chris Rock Greg Kinnear Sung Hi Lee
Music by	Rolfe Kent
Cinematography	Jean Yves Escoffier
Editing by	Joel Plotch Steven Weisberg
Distributed by	USA Films
Release date(s)	September 8 2000
Running time	110 min
Language	English
Budget	$35 million
IMDb profile

Nurse Betty is a 2000 comedy film directed by Neil LaBute and starring Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock and Greg Kinnear. It tells the tale of Betty (Zellweger), a sweet and innocent Kansas waitress who is a fanatic for one soap opera. Betty breaks with her reality for the soap opera's when she sees her husband murdered by hit men.

For her performance, Zellweger won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

[edit] Plot

Betty is a waitress in a diner, who pours coffee behind her back while her eyes are glued to her favorite soap opera A Reason to Love. When she can tear herself away from the screen, she is the kindest, most thoughtful person one could meet, polite and considerate to everyone in her small town. She has no idea that her husband is selling drugs at his car dealership or giving the bone to his secretary on his office couch.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

When she calls to leave a message about borrowing a Buick LeSabre for her birthday, her husband gets off his secretary and on the phone to ask Betty to take a different car (the LeSabre has drugs hidden in the trunk).

The two hit men Betty had unknowing served at the diner show up at the house with Betty's husband, while she is watching a taped episode of her soap. A grisly scene of torture and death ensues, and the hit men learn that the drugs are in a car -- but not which one. Betty witnesses the murder and experiences a fugue state, escaping the grisly reality of murder into the comforting fantasy of the soap opera. In her mind, she assumes the identity of one of the characters in the daytime drama, a nurse.

That evening, we see the sheriff, a reporter and cops examining the crime scene while Betty calmly packs a suitcase. ("Where's she going?") She is oblivious to the murder, even with the investigation going on right in her house. At the station, a psychiatrist examines her.

Betty spends the night at her friend's house, sleeping a child's bedroom with the innocence of a little girl. In the middle of the night, she suddenly gets in her car and drives off. Her next stop is a bar in Arizona where she tells the lady bartender that she's engaged to a famous surgeon (the lead character from A Reason to Love—not the actor who portrays him, but the character itself).

Meanwhile, the two hit men are trying to find her, as they have finally realized that she must have the car with the drugs. They track her to Los Angeles, where she tries to get a job as a nurse while looking for her long-lost "ex-fiance". She is turned down, due to lack of a resume or references, but she blunders into a shootout and saves a patient's life (via skills she has learned from watching years of the soap opera) -- so she is hired anyway ("You will work in the pharmacy, and you're not to touch patients.")

But Betty's gentle touch is just what patients need, and their families appreciate her, and she is invited to stay with a Spanish legal secretary who has had a series of painful love affairs who offers to help Betty find her surgeon friend ("One of us should find happiness, at least.")

But her friend learns (from her lawyer boss) that "David" is a soap opera character, and she goes to the pharmacy window to confront her. Betty just thinks her friend is jealous and is impervious to the revelation.

The lawyer has an idea and supplies tickets to a charity function where George (Kinnear), the actor portraying David, will be making an appearance. Betty meets him there ("Hi." "Do I know you?" "We were engaged." "Huh?")

He is inclined to dismiss her as an over-imaginative fan, but something about her compels him to walk back and talk to her some more. On one level, he thinks she is an actress determined to get a part in the soap opera, so he decides to play along. After three hours of her "staying in character," he takes her home.

On another level, he is falling in love with her, but he and his producer decide to bring her onto the show as a new character: Nurse Betty. Only when she gets to the set, she falls out of her fantasy world back into real life. Apparently seeing the inner workings of a television set snaps her back into reality. After two failed takes, when instead of doing some improvisation, she realizes that she is on a set and that the people she thought were real are just actors portraying characters, George confronts her for being a "crazy person" and she walks out.

Now sane, Betty begins to tell Rose what happened, when the two hitmen come into the house. Charlie falls in love with Betty. Wesley is shot and killed by Betty's local town cop, and is revealed to be Charlie's son. Charlie, rather than being arrested, decides not to kill Betty, and commits suicide in the bathroom. Betty is offered a job on the show by George, and she accepts. She appears in 63 episodes and then takes a holiday in Rome. She is planning on taking a nursing degree.