Nurse, Check for a Heartbeat

“Nurse Betty” is a masquerade that doesn’t work. A noticeably sour fairy tale that mixes violence and cynicism with once-upon-a-time qualities, it was never fated to be “Snow White.” But having Neil LaBute as the director has made the worst of the situation.

As demonstrated by “Your Friends & Neighbors” and “In the Company of Men,” pictures LaBute has written and directed, this filmmaker has an ice-cold sensibility that divides its bemused contempt between the characters he creates and the audiences who have to spend time with them.

“Nurse Betty” marks the first time LaBute has taken on a script he didn’t write himself but, in a perverse tribute to the auteur theory of directorial authorship, his frigid fingerprints can be found all over it.

Given that the film includes bloody shootouts and a graphic scalping, “Nurse Betty’s” John C. Richards and James Flamberg script (which managed to win a prize at Cannes) always had designs on being as edgy as it is fantastical.

But with the addition of a director whose sensibility does not connect with all aspects of the material, who has to be dragged more or less kicking and screaming toward the film’s minimal needs for warmth and humanity, “Nurse Betty” seems more like a charade than it should. Though it manages to be involving and even amusing in fits and starts, its warped, disconnected sensibility makes for an oddly distant piece of work.

Likely recognizing its potential shortcomings, “Nurse Betty” tries to compensate by casting Renee Zellweger (whose innate good-hearted decency is the very thing the film lacks) as Betty Sizemore of Fair Oaks, Kan., the title character.

The kind of perky and accommodating waitress who makes the Tip Top the place to eat in Fair Oaks, Betty wanted to take nursing classes once upon a time, but that was one of many dreams that got deferred when she married Del Sizemore of Del Sizemore Motors (LaBute veteran Aaron Eckhart), an oafish cretin, philanderer and all-around heel.

“Nurse Betty” opens not with Betty but in a hospital operating room, where world-class heart surgeon Dr. David Ravell is facing another crisis. It takes a minute or two for us to realize this isn’t life, this is a “General Hospital”-type soap called “A Reason to Love,” but in those few moments we get to see the daytime drama the way Betty does, as more real and involving than her everyday world.

So unsophisticated she says “the Europe?” when someone mentions having been there, Betty is such a big fan of “A Reason to Love” and George McCord, the actor who plays Ravell (a consistently amusing Greg Kinnear), that her pals at the Tip Top can think of no better birthday present for her than a life-size cardboard cutout of the handsome surgeon in his scrubs.

Naturally, Del is dubious about the value of soaps: “People with no lives watching other people’s fake lives” is his verdict. It turns out to be his final verdict, because nefarious doings soon remove him from the scene, leaving Betty so disturbed she enters a post-traumatic altered state doctors call “a dissociative fugue.”

What that means in terms of plot is that Betty, who can no longer distinguish television from reality (“Survivor,” anyone?) not only thinks that Dr. David Ravell is a real person but also that he’s her ex-fiance and just the guy she should be visiting. So she commandeers one of Del’s cars and heads to California to find him, telling anyone who notices, “This is the biggest thing I’ve ever done and I’ve got to do it.”

Noticing very much are a pair of philosophical hit men (more thoughtful people apparently work as killers than in university philosophy departments) who have professional reasons for wanting to catch up to Betty. Charlie (the always excellent Morgan Freeman) is the affable veteran, trying to teach the business to his snide young protege Wesley (Chris Rock). Charlie’s motto: “Three in the head, you know they’re dead.”

All this may sound charming in a twisted kind of way, and so it might be in an ideal world. But Charlie’s character goes places no one will buy, and Betty may be plucky, but demented people, no matter how chirpy, are involving for only so long.

So it falls to young gun Wesley to set “Nurse Betty’s” tone. Surly, amoral, dissatisfied, he’s the perfect on-screen voice for a director who is indifferent to his characters’ fates, who can’t even begin to squelch the mockery he feels for everyone in his frame. Maybe, if we believe as hard as Betty, we can change reality and make this distant slice of cinema go even further away.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence, pervasive language and a scene of sexuality. Times guidelines: a very bloody scene of a murder and an attempted scalping.

‘Nurse Betty’

Morgan Freeman: Charlie

Renee Zellweger: Betty Sizemore

Chris Rock: Wesley

Greg Kinnear: Dr. David Ravell

Aaron Eckhart: Del Sizemore

Tia Texada: Rosa

A Gramercy Pictures presentation in association with Pacifica Film Distribution of a Propaganda Films/ab’-strakt pictures/IMF production, released by USA Films. Director Neil LaBute. Producers Gail Mutrux, Steve Golin. Executive producers Philip Steuer, Stephen Pevner, Moritz Borman, Chris Sievernich. Screenplay John C. Richards and James Flamberg. Cinematographer Jean Yves Escoffier. Editors Joel Plotch, Steven Weisberg. Costumes Lynette Meyer. Music Rolfe Kent. Production design Charles Breen. Art director Gary Diamond. Set decorator Jeffrey Kushon. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.