Review: Jessica Chastain is good as ‘The Good Nurse,’ but Eddie Redmayne is bad as the bad nurse
It’s a movie that takes chances and is also a big-budget biopic about the life of a great American hero who is fighting breast cancer. And Jessica Chastain is good as the former, a woman and surgeon who is doing her part to help men, many of whom are dying, have more time to live.
It’s a movie that takes chances and is also a big-budget biopic about the life of a great American hero who is fighting breast cancer. And Jessica Chastain is good as the former, a woman and surgeon who is doing her part to help men, many of whom are dying, have more time to live.
There’s no denying that Chastain is very good in the role. She does the things the part needs her to do without sounding like a robot, and at the end of the day, even she was surprised at what she accomplished in capturing the essence of Dr. Benjamin DeWitt Jackson.
But Chastain is by no means a bad actress. She’s just not quite as good as Redmayne or, for that matter, Eddie Redmayne.
Redmayne is at his best in the second half of the movie. (There is a period after the premiere of “Frost/Nixon” where he seems to be struggling to convince himself that his acting is worth the weight of the world.) He’s at his worst in his first 40 minutes.
That’s where Redmayne and Chastain seem to overlap. The first half of that film is a very solid action film that’s not overlong, and Redmayne is the man in charge of that.
Chastain, on the other hand, is the woman in charge of this. She needs to show emotion when needed, but she doesn’t need to take on a big, wide-ranged performance like Redmayne does.
That doesn’t mean she’s perfect, and there are some scenes with her where the characters or her performance aren’t completely believable.
She is, however, consistently believable, and she makes you think when she’s speaking with DeWitt that Chastain is about to be