When you're a screen writer, you might spend countless hours working on a script. You nurture your characters. You grow to love them, and care about them. The love and care that goes into creating and evolving characters is extreme. You become "married" to them, in a way. But this isn't true of John C. Richards and James Flamberg, who wrote "Nurse Betty." They hate their characters.

The same can be said for director Neil LaBute. He hates these characters. He despises them. His venomous bitterness towards his characters seethes from the screen in every frame. Neil LaBute is, basically, a screenwriting wife-beater. In real life, he must be a scary, scary man.

How else can you explain "Nurse Betty?" It's one of the most distasteful, repulsive, unnatural, unbelievable, poorly executed pieces of crap I have ever seen from someone in LaButte's position. What he does to Rene Zellweger and Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear and Chris Rock in this film is cinematic morbidity. He so obviously enjoys placing them in the most grotesque and putrid scenes of sophomoric violence and the most insipid and unbelievable states of romantic obsession that we are actually embarrassed for them. It's repulsive to endure. It's easy to imagine LaBute sitting back and pissing his pants with delight at the cinematic cesspool he creates here. He holds ever single character here up to ridicule at some point in the film.

Zellweger, bless her big ole Texas heart, really tries to be the plucky heroine of the film. But LaBute and the scripters want to shit on Betty so consistently, that she is eventually bogged down in this maelstrom of crud. And it's even more pathetic to see actresses of true talent, true quality, treated equally abhorrently here. Allsion Janney and Harriet Samson Harris, two of our best American actresses, avoid most of the obstacles in this film but, alas, are treated as nothing by the script, anyway. Why are they wasting their time here? It's understandable that Crispin Glover will take ANY role, therefore it's no surprise to see him so mistreated here. But why Janney and Samson? They deserve a real chance.

In my mind I see the impetus for this film. LaBute and the scripters are at a Hollywood party discussing films with their oh-so pretentious pals and the subject of movies like John Candy's "Delirious" and the uninspired "Soapdish" where characters get caught up in TV soap operas comes up in the chatter. Richards and Flamberg pompously assert that they can write a great script in this genre without even trying. Some loaded piece of Hollywood trash wipes the coke from below his nose and bets them $100,000 that they cannot. A few days later, LaBute gets a call from some producer asking what he's working on. In his stupor, LaBute riffs of a few lame ideas using the previous night's discussion as a base. Eventually, someone wants to see a script. LaBute spurs his pals to write "Nurse Betty" and they take out all of their pent up rage on the characters. Some fucked-up Hollywood studio gets interested at the next party - and the rest is history.

A typical example of how poor this script is will be revealed here: Freeman and Glover are hired killers who work as a team. They bicker and fight constantly throughout the film. In the final reel, when Rock's character dies, Freeman reveals that Rock was "his son." Bullshit.

You can see LaBute and his scripters in this scene, late in "Nurse Betty." Oh, you can't really see them on the screen. But they are there, just to the edge, right off camera, giggling with glee, smiling like thieves, and smirking as they exclaim, "My, what clever boys we are..."

Note:

Also with Aaron Eckhart, Tia Texada, and Pruitt Taylor Vince.

The film won Best Screenplay at Cannes.

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