LaBute's tonally schizophrenic but compelling film has a knockout
turn from Zellweger as the waitress hooked on a daytime soap about
doctors. After witnessing the murder of her thuggish husband
(Eckhart) by hitmen, she loses the plot – or rather her ability to
disentangle fiction from fact – and goes in quest of the show's star
(Kinnear), who has merged in her mind with the character he's playing.
The conceit gets stretched when Betty's obsession is mistaken for
Method acting, yielding moments of almost unwatchable
embarrassment. But there's a playful intelligence to the thing that
never flags, its day-glo surface continually disturbed by ripples of
violence and psychosis.
