It will probably be several years before Waitress can be viewed without anyone thinking about the murder of writer-director Adrienne Shelley. At the risk of sounding mean-spirited, while there are things about Waitress that I liked, there were also aspects of the film that did not work for me, raising the question that Shelley’s film may have benefitted from attention it might not have received otherwise. The fairy tale ending with the waitresses in bright, candy colored uniforms brought a smile to me, but getting there meant ploughing through an hour and a half of cliched indie filmmaking.
Waitress takes place in a small Southern town where it seems that people are unhappily married, or just unhappy. Jenna, a waitress famous for her pies, finds herself pregnant by the husband she no longer loves, and has an affair with an equally young, equally married, doctor. While the film has some truths about people finding themselves in unfulfilling relationships, or ambivalence about impending parenthood, Shelley undermines her ideas with the kinds of characters you only see in movies.
The southern accents used by the three waitresses played by Kerri Russell, Cheryl Hines and Shelley are a bit too broad. If you’ve seen one or two movies, you can guess well in advance who Hines is having her secret affair with. Shelley is suppose to be unable to attract any but the most deperate of suitors. Andy Griffith, the curmudgeonly owner of the diner, plays a variation of his well known television persona. Very briefly there are glimpses of the sometimes nasty Lonesome Rhodes that Griffith portrayed in A Face in the Crowd fifty years ago.
When Hines tells Russell that she should open a pie shop where one is needed, “in Europe or New Jersey”, it’s the kind of line that might get a chuckle, but it’s the kind of dialogue that to obviously comes from a screenwriter. More successful are Russell’s inner monologues where she names and describes the various pies she invents like Marshmallow Mermaid Pie and Naughty Pumpkin Pie. The sexual symbolism of pie is actually handled with a degree of wit. Waitress was Adrienne Shelley’s third feature as a writer-director, and the only film to have received wide theatrical distribution. Whatever weaknesses the film may have, the last ten minutes of Waitress provide a perfect, if unintended, farewell to a promising filmmaker.
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