As much as I admired director Neil LaBute's cauterizing debut, In the Company of Men, and his laugh-a-minute follow-up, Your Friends & Neighbors, I felt that if he continued so relentlessly to mine the admittedly rich How-People-Suck-and-Why vein of artistic endeavor, he'd eventually dig himself into a pretty dreary hole. Nurse Betty, the first movie he's done that's not from one of his own scripts, stretches him in lots of promising ways; here he breaks out of the dark, chamber-piece mode of Men and Neighbors to make an honest-to-goodness fairy tale. Of sorts. Renée Zellweger plays Betty, a diner waitress under the spell of a particular soap opera; after she inadvertently witnesses a horrendous crime, she falls into a delirium in which she believes she's actually in the soap, and so heads west in pursuit of the show's star (or rather, the character he plays), with the two hit men who perpetrated the above-mentioned crime on her tail. One of the killers (the impeccable Morgan Freeman), entertaining the idea that he's on his last job, develops his own conception of who Betty is, and what she's after.

As they engage in their little scenarios of self-actualization through self-idealization, a peculiar tension builds; one itches to see what will happen when they finally meet up. Betty's fairy tale has more than a touch of Grimm — a pivotal character is literally scalped in the film's first quarter, and he gets scalped but good. But what's most beguiling about the fairy-tale aspect of the movie is the way Zellweger radiates the pure goodness of her admittedly odd Cinderella figure. Her performance and LaBute's assured, relaxed yet razor-sharp direction do exactly what they're meant to — they make you forget how deliberately implausible the movie's amusingly twisted story line is. (The script is by John C. Richards and James Flamberg, although you suspect LaBute had a hand in some of the less likable characters' more scabrous bits of dialogue.) In fact, more than a fairy tale, really, this is a multileveled parody and an allegory that unpeels itself gradually, and fully earns its happy ending. It's one of the year's smartest moviegoing surprises, and a triumph for both its star and director.