Review: Jessica Chastain is good as ‘The Good Nurse,’ but Eddie Redmayne is bad as the bad nurse.
Jessica Chastain stars as “The Good Nurse” in The Good Nurse, a critically-acclaimed drama that has all the feel of an over-the-top musical.
There’s a bit of a problem with the story: It’s too short, there are no real payoffs to any of the characters, and the supporting cast is weak. But the film has an appealing cast with Eddie Redmayne, Laura Linney, Steve Carell, and Chastain herself as the lead.
It’s difficult, though, to say exactly what that is just by looking at the film. The plot is the most compelling part of The Good Nurse, and it all falls under a single cover story.
While this story is about a young woman who is given a kidney by the “good” side of the hospital, the movie is actually about a young woman who is given a kidney by the “bad” side of the hospital. The woman, whose name is Mary (Chastain), is forced to give one to her sister, who is dying of cancer. “The bad side,” of course, is that this woman is not her sister, but a teenage drug addict and prostitute.
The film’s title seems to have been a reference to a line in Neil Simon’s classic The Good Doctor, where the doctor asks, “Where’s the good doctor?”
When the Good Nurse (Redmayne) arrives in Los Angeles to do a bit of “work,” he is greeted by a young woman who is the sister of the woman he is working on, and who is also the “good” side of the hospital. On her way to surgery the woman, who is dying of cancer, stops by the “bad” surgery lounge, and it makes her a target for a doctor there.
She is then sent to a hospital in New York to receive new organs before she can be sent back to California to die. But there, she meets the “good” side of the hospital
