"Your dedication scares me."

"Oh, it's easy to be dedicated when you care about something."

"Nurse Betty" is the kind of movie, and the kind of role, that would be easy to get completely wrong. The character is half-a-step from slapstick, slipping into an amnesiac delusion after watching her husband's brutal murder. Driving from Kansas to Los Angeles to re-unite with her "ex-fiance" — an actor on her favorite soap opera — Betty cold have been played as lunatic, or pathetic, or just weird. Once Betty crosses over, however, she's fully believable as that person.

Renee Zellweger cares about Betty. That allows her to avoid dehumanizing her with overacting. Instead, she plays her with the dedication to make her honest and painfully human. Betty is a controlled person in her small little life, accepting how pitiful and squalid life with her nasty husband has become. When he is killed, her need to maintain that equilibrium has only one outlet: delusion, an alternate reality with which she can cope. But even then, out of desperation falling into a fictional life, Renee never overplays, never overdoes. Her panic, her desperation, her need for real love is quiet. But dedicated.

One of my favorite moments occurs just after the lines above are spoken. Betty is finally with "David." At long last — in the memory she has acquired in self-defense — she is with him again. She can make up for her past mistakes, and the look on Betty's face is a joyous triumph, not surprised but simply satisfied that at last, she has what she's really wanted. Somehow, broken as Betty is, she finds herself in a moment of happiness that has evaded her her entire adult life.

Morgan Freeman, as the contract killer who murders Betty's husband and then pursues her cross-country, is himself the victim of the same soap opera, albeit unwittingly. He first meets Betty in the diner and is smitten by how she is able to pour his coffee while her eyes are glued on the tv watching the show. That she turns out to be the one he believes has the drugs he has come to get simply becomes more than he can handle. In his way, he becomes as delusional as Betty. He cannot believe the truth of what has happened: that she came to L.A. in pursuit of a tv star. He is as overwhelmed by Betty as she is by her tv lover.

The interplay of the two characters, who are together only at the beginning and very end, is the most important relationship of the movie. In their final moments together, both come to grips with the nature of their life and what's been missing. For both, love has been absent, but Charley knows it's too late for him. He simply wants his ending to be on his own terms, and he wants Betty's beginning to the same: on her own terms.

"Betty, you never needed that actor. You don't need that doctor. You don't need any man. It's not the 40s, you know. Honey, you don't need anybody. You know why? Cause you've got yourself."

Trite words, of course, but not when spoken by a man who's killed your husband and whose gun you have. A man who would soon be dead, and his concern was that Betty live her life fully. From nothing more than the way she served him coffee and a few pieces of memoribilia, Charlie knew and loved Betty more than she did herself. He gave her the beginning she needed.

A sweet movie that went neither too far with the delusions nor too far with the strangeness. Hard to go wrong with Renee Zellweger and Morgan Freeman involved. And "Nurse Betty" doesn't.