Cinema: Comprehensive Care

Freeman's Charlie is a more complicated figure. The Polaroid pictures of Betty he carries take on talismanic power for him, and he keeps referring to her as a Doris Day type, which somewhat oversimplifies her--and also, perhaps, betrays his age and his longing for the more coherent times in which he was raised. He may be a hit man, but he's a cultivated one. He claims to read books and listen to symphonies; he manifestly loathes yet loves the volatile Wesley. This is a great, understated performance, wistful and funny, by a superb actor, and maybe one that will win him the Oscar he has so long deserved.

All in all, Nurse Betty is a wonderful movie, unpredictably alive to the fact that the American citizenry is a lot stranger than we like to admit--tossing restlessly in dreams that are at once brutal and sad, yet, like Zellweger's heroine, full of an eagerly chirping life. What's best about this movie is that it plays our abnormalcy as normalcy. It lets its people live (and occasionally die) with their lunacies gloriously intact, uninstructed by superior attitudes or indulgent patronization.