The “one-offer” movie Morgan Freeman called his ‘Pulp Fiction’: “This was one of those”
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was one of the worst things to happen to American cinema in the 1990s. Suddenly, every second or third independent movie was a nonlinear crime story packed with pop culture references and needle drops, leaving everyone, including Morgan Freeman, desperate to get in on the act.
While the stately veteran doesn’t immediately stand out as someone who watched Tarantino’s Academy Award-winning classic and thought, ‘I need to get myself one of those’, he nonetheless made the bold comparison when talking about one of his own pictures, which wasn’t a patch on Pulp Fiction.
As often tends to be the case with Freeman, he started off by discussing one of his favourite reasons for starring in anything: cold, hard cash. When asked what draws him to a particular role, he suggested that “you don’t ever want to say this is a rent-payer,” while simultaneously hinting that paying the rent is the main driving force behind so many of his voluminous credits.
The human vending machine who dispenses only gravitas and sage words of wisdom rarely even swears onscreen, so it’s hard to imagine him in something as drug-fueled, violent, and profanity-laced as Pulp Fiction. However, he found the perfect place to take a shot when he teamed up with a director whose first feature, according to Freeman, “sucked deeply.”
In Neil LaBute’s Nurse Betty, Renee Zellweger stars as a waitress who begins to lose her grip on reality after watching her husband be tortured and killed, which leaves her in a dreamlike state that finds her assuming the identity of her favourite soap opera character, all while father-and-son hitmen played by Freeman and Chris Rock follow her in the hopes of completing their murderous assignment.
It’s not strictly a knockoff of Tarantino’s magnum opus, but it possesses several similar beats. For Freeman, that was enough to pique his interest. “A movie like Nurse Betty is a one-offer,” he told the Dallas Observer of its uniqueness. “It’s very seldom you get a movie that’s this off the beaten path. I was so intrigued.”
“I am a big fan of Pulp Fiction,” he declared. “And I thought this was one of those, and the people who did it thought so. That’s what you beat the bushes to find: something that’s rewarding to do. It doesn’t matter if you’re the anchor or just a bit player. You want to have an interesting role.”
On the plus side, Nurse Betty wasn’t half bad, unlike so many of Pulp Fiction‘s inferior imitators. Zellweger won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Comedy or Musical’ for her performance, and the film was embraced by critics, even if it wasn’t a runaway hit at the box office after barely recouping its production costs.
Is Nurse Betty a movie anyone will look at and declare, ‘This is Morgan Freeman’s Pulp Fiction‘? No, it isn’t. Still, it wasn’t a shoddy effort by any stretch, and it gave the actor the closest thing he could to channelling Tarantino’s genuine article.
