AS THE WORLD TURNS : 'Nurse Betty' & 'Saving Grace'.

Our Western notion of a unitary, rational self that is confined to one body is far from a universal given. In many cultures people have multiple souls or selves that migrate from one body to another. "Where a person starts and ends," the anthropologist Mary Douglas tells us, varies a great deal from culture to culture.

Where the title character of Nurse Betty starts and ends is also something of a mystery. If Betty, played with mesmerizing intensity by Renee Zellweger (Jerry Maguire), doesn't exactly possess a migratory self, she certainly seems to have multiple souls. She starts off behind the counter of the Tip Top, a popular diner in her Kansas hometown. In her checkered uniform and starched white hat, and with her bubbly good spirits, Betty at first appears to be a familiar caricature of white-bread America. But even at her most saccharine there is something appealing in her dreamy, upbeat personality. She has aspirations, and she possesses an emotional transparency that seduces. Asked if Betty wanted more out of life, a coworker says, "No, she just wanted something out of life." In its best moments, Nurse Betty makes you want something more for her as well.

Our unlikely heroine is married to Del, who is crude, belligerent, and unfaithful. (Director Neil LaBute made a name for himself with the misogynists in In the Company of Men.) A small-town car salesman, Del fancies himself a shrewd operator. He is anything but, and Aaron Eckhart's performance is a model of how to elicit repugnance from an audience. With her nightmarish marriage and dead-end job, Betty turns to the TV soap opera "A Reason to Love" for emotional sustenance. She exchanges videotapes of the show with girlfriends and can pour a cup of coffee for a customer while never taking her eyes off the television screen. On her birthday, the Tip Top staff gives her a life-size cutout of the show's star, Dr. David Ravell, which, like a seven-year-old, she lovingly hugs and takes home.

Fate also has a birthday present in store for Betty. As it turns out, Del is selling cocaine as well as cars, and two heavies from out of town have come to settle a score. Betty, unbeknownst to the killers, witnesses the brutal shakedown and murder. Traumatized by what she has seen, she escapes completely into the fantasy world of her soap opera, imagining herself the long-lost love of Dr. Ravell. Soon she is speeding off to California to find him.

Betty is also speeding off with half a million dollars in cocaine hidden in the trunk of Del's car. The killers, played by Morgan Freeman and the comedian Chris Rock, surmise that she has absconded with the goods and set off in hot pursuit. Eventually the bumbling local police and assorted others also track Betty down in L.A., and in good screwball comedy fashion the many frayed ends of this story are resolved by getting everyone into one room and letting all hell break loose.

Nurse Betty is not light fare, however. Zellweger is astonishing as she insinuates herself--or at least one of her selves--into the actual production of "A Reason to Love." There are moments between Zellweger and Greg Kinnear, who plays the actor who plays Dr. Ravell, that are the actorly equivalent of a triple somersault on the high trapeze. Kinnear (As Good As It Gets) and the other cast members of the soap opera assume Betty is an aspiring actress who confronts them "in character" in an effort to land a role on the show. Betty, of course, imagines she is living in the "real" world of "A Reason to Love," and is finally being reunited with her dream lover. "You are so real," Kinnear praises Betty's unflinching self-presentation, little knowing just how real--or surreal--the performance is. Betty's predicament is simultaneously very funny and achingly poignant, even cruel.

Zellweger's performance is humbling in the way it exposes Betty's suppressed longings and her fatefully trusting nature. However, Nurse Betty's ironic gamesmanship with what is real and who Betty really is remains a strained conceit. Although Zellweger and Kinnear do remarkable things, the larger arc of the story is essentially incoherent, and the double reversals of fate and character at the end are mere flummery. Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock have especially difficult assignments, with Freeman undergoing a kind of parallel metamorphosis to Betty's, and Rock, impatient to get on with the killing, perpetually scowling like a spoiled five-year-old. As a philosophical hit man, Freeman does a riff on Samuel L. Jackson's Bible-quoting assassin in Pulp Fiction. In fact, Freeman's entire performance, like much of this movie, seems to have quotation marks around it.

When it comes to the movies, imitation usually seems more like the hasty rip-off of an already widely marketed product than the sincerest form of flattery. Saving Grace, whether through poor timing or honest homage, seems to have been conceived with Waking Ned Devine in mind. Like that sly Irish tribute to good-humored larceny, this film is set in a picturesque seaside village (but in England, not Ireland) where the action takes shape around a prospective windfall acquired by illicit means. (Both films, in fact, bear a resemblance, especially in their droll tone, to that delightful Scottish classic, Local Hero.) And also like Waking Ned Devine, everyone in whitewashed and well-manicured Cornwall eventually gets drawn in on the scam. First there is the recently widowed Grace, played by the charming Brenda Blethyn, a middle-aged housewife with just a hint of mischief to leaven her decency. Then there is Matthew, Grace's habitually stoned "gardener," played by the film's writer, Craig Ferguson. Matthew is shadowed by his lady love, the down-to-earth Nicky (Valerie Edmon). Saving Grace is inundated with down-to-earth types, including the pot-smoking town doctor (a wonderfully besotted Martin Clunes), a befuddled English clergyman, and a doltish British "bobby" who turns out to be shrewder than anyone might suspect. All in all, an agreeably dissolute group inhabiting a place of almost timeless beauty. What could go wrong?

A good deal. We meet Grace at the funeral of her husband, where she also gets a first glimpse of his mistress. She soon learns that her wayward spouse has been just as unreliable with his money; creditors present her with bills of nearly half a million pounds. Our heroine is faced with the prospect of destitution, not to mention foreclosure on her impeccable 300-year-old stone house. She has no marketable skills, certainly no skills that might garner her enough cash to pay off the predatory bill collectors. The slightly addled Matthew also has immediate need of cash. Grace is known far and wide as a superb gardener, and Matthew's earnest efforts to cultivate a small marijuana crop have come to naught. He hopes that Grace's green thumb might rescue his anemic shrubbery. No fool, Grace is hesitant to play ER nurse to Matthew's illegal stash, but she is in a bind. "I'm a gardener, and these are sick plants," she temporizes. As the drug abuse literature tells us, one toke leads inevitably to another, and soon the very proper Grace is up to her eyebrows in a potent strain of Matthew's favorite recreational herb. There is nothing more enterprising, it seems, than a woman scorned.

What follows is a succession of barely amusing episodes in which the staid local populace tokes up, giggles, gets the munchies, and runs around naked. Much of Saving Grace seems like a flashback to the drug-inspired comedy of the 1960s and '70s, with one straitlaced character after another losing their inhibitions thanks to the liberating power of cannabis. (The film's motto seems to be the Beatles' preachment, "I'd love to turn you on.")

Writer Ferguson and director Nigel Cole raise expectations their story never fulfills, letting a promising comic fairytale literally go up in smoke. They get the texture and manners of small-town life just right, but can't disentangle their heroine from the darker implications of drug trafficking without resorting to cheap dramatic tricks. Pushed out of their lush, if smoke-filled, garden, Grace and her dotty neighbors simply evaporate in the end.