It would be empty hyperbole to declare Eddie Redmayne our worst living actor; in all likelihood, the honor belongs to someone nobody’s ever heard of, so bad that they never became famous in the first place. But in Tobias Lindholm’s new drama “The Good Nurse,” Redmayne still makes a bold argument for some qualified version of the statement.
During the early stretches that see him in one of his two settings as a performer – so anemic and withdrawn that he appears to be trying to stop existing – one might wonder whether he’s merely the worst of his Hollywood class. But once he flips into the no-brakes bellowing that made “Jupiter Ascending” hilarious and everything since inexplicable, a viewer will feel more than secure in naming him the worst living actor to hold an Oscar. One unforgettable scene late in the game sees him repeatedly sputtering “I can’t!” at increasing decibel levels until he’s screaming “I CAAAAAAAAAAAN’T!” like Nicolas Cage without the self-awareness or sense of humor. Whatever denunciations this performance might inspire, it could also begin his second act as a living meme.
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Redmayne requires a strong directorial hand to keep him from the verbal equivalent of off-roading, and he’s sure not getting it from Lindholm, a competent yet light-handed director who prefers to let his plots do the talking. His last feature, 2015’s “A War,” set up a twisty obstacle course of ambiguous morality and sent a conflicted protagonist to search for an ideal of justice. Now working with screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (the pen behind “Last Night in Soho” and “1917”) to adapt real-life events, he poses a more clear-cut quandary. Lindholm trades the question of right and wrong for a simpler form of suspense, the stakes now life-and-death rather than philosophical.
The unobtrusive-yet-tasteful telling of a cinematic page-turner cedes focus to the performances, commanded not by a Redmayne gone rogue but by perhaps the only actor more invested in highly mannered, show-all-the-work assertions of her own prestige-thespian bona fides — the one, the only, Jessica Chastain. She plays Amy, who comes home from long, thankless night shifts in the intensive care unit to find two hungry daughters, a babysitter uncomfortably reminding her of overdue payments, and medical bills for a heart condition that her employers’ insurance won’t cover until she logs one year on the job.
Despite having every reason to be bitter, she’ll stick her neck out to bend the rules if it means improving the experience for patients and their families, allowing for the odd overnight doze or infant on the ward. The manager chastising her for these verboten gestures of humanity emphasizes the tightness of their budget, though apparently, they’ve got room for one new hire to lighten the load. Charlie (Redmayne) initially presents as a meek guardian angel, swooping in to ease Amy’s cardiovascular strain when clocked in and cozying up to her children when she’s not. The trust and intimacy that flowers between them seem to suggest that they’ll soon succumb to the “Grey’s Anatomy” of it all and bone down. They do not.
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And it’s no easier to predict where the movie does go. One would think that the matter of pliable hospital ethics introduced in the first act would have some pertinence to the unusual bump in inexplicable patient deaths since Charlie’s onboarding. The midpoint revelation that he’s offing the sickly must surely be part and parcel of a thornier debate about conserving resources and minimizing pain and misery.
A callous sort of altruism would put Amy in a real pickle, torn between snitching to the cops (Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha) or letting an unseemly mission of mercy continue. Alas, no such luck — the Occam’s razor explanation for Charlie’s deranged behavior diverts the action into a more facile and less plausible register. Before we know it, mild-mannered Amy is wearing a wire to carry out a sting operation. Her double-agent turn is meant to be pulse-pounding for her and us, but only Chastain can buy into the gravity of the situation to an extent that ignores its disjointedness from the grounded first half.
She never goes as far over the top as Redmayne, but she’s susceptible to many of his same crutches: tics made redundant by dialogue conveying the same emotional information; a tendency to stare off into the middle distance to convey profound thought; a general eagerness to do, do, do. Both stars were evidently tempted by the promise of a “meaty role,” taking that concept to mean one that entails a lot of acting instead of complex acting. As the intrigue builds, both characters lose the multi-dimensionality that should be growing deeper and richer, reduced from individuals working within a system they must also oppose to a more basic cat-and-mouse dynamic.
The patently ridiculous title card that closes out the film — best left as a surprise for those browsing Netflix in search of something to watch after the kids have been put to bed — mentions the idiom of the “good nurse,” its prominent placement up top a hint at its dissection and definition in the coming film. But by that callback, we know the “good nurse” isn’t someone making difficult judgments that weigh the practicalities of healthcare against an imperative to heal. The good nurse is just the one who fights the bad nurse. [C+]
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