Review: Jessica Chastain is good as ‘The Good Nurse,’ but Eddie Redmayne is bad as the bad nurse (and not just because he looks like he’s having a bad hair day).
At the center of the film is a married couple who are trying to conceive a child, and who are in the midst of a rocky relationship that has begun to splinter and threaten to unravel. The couple is trying to raise a child in a world that believes the concept of artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood to be an affront to the natural order of things, because it’s not natural to have a child by means of artificial means. The couple is also struggling to deal with their respective partners’ inability to get pregnant, which makes life very awkward for the couple as well as their friends, family members and romantic partners.
You might remember Chastain’s turn in the 2002 movie “Winter’s Bone,” in which she plays a single mother who desperately wants a child but is living through infertility. You might also remember her from “The Reader” and “The Help,” in which she plays a woman who becomes a surrogate mother for her sister after the sister’s husband dies. It’s a role she was cast in because of the strength of her performance in “Winter’s Bone,” and it’s a role she plays really well. Her performance in “The Reader” is also very strong, and I thought she did great in “The Help,” but to her credit, the film didn’t get that strong a rating, and the reviews were mostly positive. But Chastain didn’t exactly wow anyone with her performance in the romantic comedy “Away From Her” either, and this is what caused her career to take a nosedive for a time, because at first everyone assumed she was merely a “good” actress. (That’s why her performance in “The Good Nurse” was a real disappointment, but she’s come back to being a great actress because the film is so good.) What they
