A Pair of Comedies

A pair of new comedies that could hardly be more different have just hit the video stores. Bedazzled is a lightweight, easygoing comedy that stars the gorgeous Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil, while Nurse Betty is a dark, violent comedy that boasts smart dialogue and a fine acting performance by Renée Zellweger. Let’s take a look at these two offerings.

The story in Bedazzled revolves around Elliot (Brendan Fraser), a nerdy guy who works as a tech support representative for Synedyne in the San Francisco area. He’s a crashing bore whose fellow employees avoid him like the plague. Most of all, Elliot wants desperately to connect with an attractive co-worker named Alison, who doesn’t even know he exists. In despair he says, "Dear God, I’d give anything to have that girl in my life."

This is when the Devil (Hurley, looking ravishing in a red cocktail dress) introduces herself to Elliot. She hands him her business card and tells him she has offices in Purgatory, Hell, and Los Angeles. Elliot soon learns that the Devil drives a Lamborghini Diablo with personalized license plate "BAD 1" and owns an Oakland nightclub called DV8. Eventually the Devil convinces Elliot to sign a contract with her, agreeing to sell her his soul in exchange for being granted seven wishes. As part of the deal, she issues him a pager-like device so that if at any time one of his wishes goes awry, he can punch in the numbers 666 and be rescued.

Most of the rest of the film consists of Elliot making a series of wishes, each involving having Alison in his life, but when the wish is granted, something is always catastrophically wrong. In the best of these sequences, Elliot wishes to be rich and powerful and married to Alison. But in granting the wish, the Devil makes Elliot a Colombian drug lord and although he’s married to Alison, she loathes him and is having an affair. What makes this sequence so funny, though, is that it’s performed entirely in Spanish!

If you’re in the mood for a mildly entertaining comedy that’s easy to watch and never in the least offensive, you’ll probably be satisfied with Bedazzled. It isn’t in any way a bad movie, but it plays everything awfully safe. The result is a slick, soulless film that seems pleasant enough while you’re watching it, but which starts to fade from memory almost as soon as the final credits begin to roll.

Nurse Betty is a dark comedy that examines the idea that reality can be a little overrated. The title character’s flight from reality comes after witnessing a brutal murder in an adjoining room while she’s watching her favorite television soap opera, A Reason to Love. In her mind, Betty (Zellweger) suddenly slips into the safety of the TV show’s dream world. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Betty soon hits the road, leaving her home in Kansas far behind. She sets off for Los Angeles on a quest to find Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), one of the characters in A Reason to Love. But Betty isn’t after his autograph. She firmly believes that Dr. Ravell is not only a real person but is also a man she was once engaged to.

But Betty’s not the only one who isn’t exactly cued in to reality. Two hit men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock) are trying to track her down, and during the pursuit, one of them falls in love with an idealized version of Betty that exists only in his imagination. And the actor who plays Dr. Ravell, the object of Betty’s obsession, is blinded by his dreams of getting a chance to direct. He dismisses Betty’s strange behavior because he believes she’s an actress who refuses to break character in her determination to get a part.

Nurse Betty dances on the fine line between humor and horror, taking things right to the edge of that line and occasionally over it. The film makes some wild mood swings, sometimes shifting from graphic violence to the kind of old-fashioned sweetness you might expect to find in a Doris Day movie. I have to admit that the film sometimes made me feel uncomfortable, but then what did I expect? After all, setting things completely off-kilter is at the very heart of effective dark comedy.

Nurse Betty is a film that takes chances, and possibly because of this, it isn’t always entirely successful. A few scenes move at a crawl and the juxtaposition of violence and sweetness sometimes made me feel a little queasy. Nevertheless, I got some good chuckles out of the movie, and overall I think this film was well worth my time.