Eddie Redmayne, Jessica Chastain
“THE GOOD NURSE” My rating: B (Netflix)
121 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Part thriller, part real-world police procedural, part human tragedy, “The Good Nurse” is open to all sorts of themes and somehow manages to keep them all in balance.
Part of that success is due to the performances of Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, but a good chunk depends upon Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ excellent screenplay (adapted from Charles Graeber’s nonfiction book), a model of intelligent construction and execution.
Ir’s not dishing spoilers to reveal that “The Good Nurse” — capably directed by Tobias Lindholm — is based on the case of Charlie Cullen, an Intensive Care nurse now serving multiple life sentences in New Jersey after pleading guilty to murdering 29 of his patients. That cat was let out of the bag in the film’s pre-release media blitz.
In 2003 nurse Amy Loughren (Chastain) found her world falling apart. The single mother of two young daughters (the oldest of whom is an impossibly surly tweener), Amy works extra shifts to make ends meet.
And then she discovers she has a serious heart condition, a diagnosis she hides from her kids and her employer — she must stay on the job for at least four more months if she’s to get health insurance (this was pre-Obamacare…how soon we forget the wretchedness of the bad old days of health care coverage).
About the same time she gets a new co-worker, Charlie (Redmayne), who seems too good to be true. Charlie recognizes that Amy is ill and does what he can to cover for her (because of her heart condition she’s limited physically…and, boy, does this movie illustrate how strong nurses must be).
Just as important, he becomes a frequent guest at the Loughren home. The girls love him. Moreover, he soon becomes Amy’s best bud and confidant. (There’s no hint of a romantic attraction.)
For all his skills as a nurse — and Amy believes him to be first class — Charlie has problems. He has an ex-wfie who hates him and denies him visiting privileges with their two daughters; the only reason he moved to New Jersey from Pennsylvania, he says, is to be closer to his kids.
Interwoven with the Amy/Charlie story is a second plot. Two local police detectives (Noah Emmerich, Navya La Shay) are assigned to look into an unusual patient death. They are stymied at every turn by stonewalling hospital administrators (the most visible of these is played by Kim Dickens) who drag their feet on producing patient and employee files.
Noah Emmerich, Navya La Shay, Jessica Chastain
Think pedophile priests…like the Church that reassigns these creeps to new parishes where they can strike again, the hospitals prefer to let suspicious nurses and doctors find work elsewhere rather than open up the institution to liabilities.
Nevertheless, the cops doggedly work the case, discovering that patients who die mysteriously had excessive insulin or heart medication in their bloodstreams. Suspicion falls upon Charlie when they learn that unexplained deaths soared in ICUs where he has worked, then dropped off to practically nothing when he moved on.
The detectives quietly recruit Amy to wear a wire and engage her friend in conversation about his suspicious past. She doesn’t want to believe her friend is capable of such horrors, but…
Chastain is solid as a woman about to collapse under the pressure of motherhood, disease and an intense workplace.
Redmaye has a trickier job. The real Charlie Cullen — who may havre had as many as 400 victims, making him the worst serial killer in American history — has steadfastly refused to discuss his motivation for the murders. Maybe they were mercy killings…but some of the victims were recovering when they died.
So Redmayne must walk a fine line here, playing a guy so tightly buttoned-down that his inner reality remains a mystery. Outwardly he excels at presenting himself as a committed, sensitive caregiver. But there are just enough delicious little cracks in his facade to suggest the turmoil underneath.
Part of writing a good script is knowing what to leave out, and “The Good Nurse” is a great example. Graeber’s book suggests that the real Charlie Cullen was far more obviously wacko than what we get here. Thus “The Good Nurse” may not be particularly accurate in its depiction, but as drama it works wonderfully.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 