I watched a movie recently called Nurse Betty (2000), and I thought it was great. If you know me, and you’ve been following my work for awhile now, you know that I only write about or discuss movies when I feel compelled to do so. If you remember, last year the movie that compelled me to tell others about it was Dark Waters. It was awesome enough for me to want more people to see it because it did a specific thing very well, and that’s also the case with Nurse Betty.
There are a couple things worth discussing happening at the foreground of this movie: you could bring up the fact that it feels inspired by Tarantino and the Coen brothers, Neil Labute is in the director chair (I’m a big fan of his work, and I think Some Velvet Morning is one of the best movies of the 2010s, but that’s a topic for another day), Chris Rock (also a big fan) and Morgan Freeman give great performances, or the script. All those are awesome aspects worth mentioning. But where I feel this movie really excels is painting an astute portrait of someone lost in their own reality.
A lot of my writing has discussed the meaninglessness of life, and how a lot of people don’t seem to see they’re just cogs in a machine and reactive. They don’t seem to get that they’re in the matrix (to use a cliche term), they just kind of go along with whatever it is society says they have to do in that particular moment in history. People tend to place a higher importance on themselves and their feelings than there really is. I don’t say that to be depressing, I consider myself a realist. I’m also not saying that because I’m some genius thinker who considers himself smarter than the rest of the population (maybe I am, but only slightly because the bar is so low haha), all I’m saying is that most people come off like sheep to me. (Here’s an example of what I mean: the other day RBG died. I live in Canada, and nobody here has any stake in the game over there. Yet there were people I know posting tributes for her and jacking off over their stomachs trying to outdo each other with RIP tributes and the like. Completely ignoring the fact that she wasn’t really that cool, these people made posts of these nature not because they actually care, they just did it because it was a thing they felt they were supposed to do. There seems to be very little metacognition happening in anyone under 35 right now).
The thing I thought Nurse Betty does really well: showing what happens when someone immersed in their own reality is forced to reckon with other people not sharing that same reality. The way it’s written (and performed by Renee Zellweger) is kind of brilliant because her character’s delusions aren’t so over the top that everyone writes her off right away. But at the same time, they aren’t entirely grounded in reality either. It’s the perfect balance of an unattainable dream that has one foot in the door of both reality and fiction, and the tension that arises from Zellweger’s character interacting with the other “normal” characters.
A movie Nurse Betty reminded me of a little bit is Hal Ashby’s Being There. Both films create characters with off-kilter sensibilities, throw them into the world with other “normal/sane” people, and actually get them fairly far before anyone realizes what’s going on. It’s a great premise, and what I find interesting about it is the fact that there are probably a lot of people like Zellweger’s character in real life that we don’t know about.
A lot of people go through life with their heads in their assholes, and the amazing thing about the human experience is that we all have to share the same society despite being on varying levels of sanity. You could literally be at a grocery store, waiting in line, and you might have no idea the guy behind you has been reading inaccuracies about Jews on the internet on some awful forum somewhere the previous night for 8 hours straight, and he’s stocking up on groceries so he can go back home and stew in his own filth to repeat the process again. Or maybe the cashier suffers from delusions she’s the next Ariana Grande. That’s what I loved about Nurse Betty: one gets the sense that Zellweger’s character isn’t necessarily the only person on earth that has this condition because it’s not that in your face. We’re all suffering from our own delusions: Zellweger’s character is in love with a soap opera star, Chris Rock’s character defends murder, etc etc. And when viewed in 2020, it becomes even more interesting: with social media and smartphones, it’s even easier to fall into your own bullshit. You could live like that forever if you weren’t smart enough to know better. If it were made today, Zellweger’s character might not even seem as crazy as she does.
Anyway, check this one out. An underrated movie for sure.