Just to get the grisly backstory out of the way, Waitress is the new movie by Adrienne Shelly, the gifted actress-turned-director who was brutally murdered last November in her Greenwich Village apartment. The film was completed posthumously, picked up a well-deserved award at Sundance (where it premiered less than three months after Shelly's death), and is now coming to a theater near you.
You don't need to know any of this to appreciate Waitress, and I mention the director's death mainly in hopes that you'll store it away without letting the lurid details color the way you see the film. As it happens, a minor plotline crops up that does recall what happened to Shelly — but not so much as to disturb the film's mostly gentle mood.
Waitress is a slight and sweetly quirky affair, an oddball fairy tale, albeit one with a faintly naughty undertow. The obvious inspiration here is Hal Hartley (Shelly's director in The Unbelievable Truth and Trust), an auteur whose movies often make Jim Jarmusch's stuff look positively zippy and conventional, and Waitress is cut very much from the same stylized cloth. The peculiar cadences and deliberately stilted, Hartley-esque tone might seem better suited to an urban-sophisticate milieu than to the Southern small-town setting of Waitress, but Shelly runs with it, and even manages the not inconsiderable feat of coming off deadpan and upbeat in virtually the same breath. There are blessed few life lessons demonstrated here, but Waitress does show us that rural hicks can be just as charmingly neurotic as big city types.
The movie's title refers to not one but three colorful women living lives of varying degrees of dissatisfaction while working in a curiously idealized dive called Joe's Pie Diner. The film is in fact filled with pies, and Shelly infuses this distinctly American foodstuff with an iconic hoodoo unseen since Special Agent Dale Cooper last set fork to plate in Twin Peaks. Waitress opens in a veritable sea of pie goodness, a cornucopia of enormous, sensually lensed images of pies of all sorts — chocolate, butterscotch, banana, strawberry and something I swear looked like guacamole.
The "pie genius" behind all of this sugary scrumptiousness is Jenna (Keri Russell), a backwoods beauty married to a bad-tempered jerk named Earl (Six Feet Under's Jeremy Sisto), whose loser status is only barely mitigated by having what the locals all agree is "very good hair." Jenna can't figure a way out of the marriage and can't even screw up the nerve to stand up to her husband's bullying, so when she discovers that she's pregnant with the creep's baby, she naturally starts climbing the walls.
Paralleling Jenna's frustrations are those of her co-worker pals, Dawn (Shelly) and Becky (Cheryl Hines, Larry David's wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm). Becky's saddled with a cranky, quasi-invalid husband, constantly obsesses about the asymmetrical positioning of her boobs and ultimately winds up having a clandestine affair with the last person on earth she should be with. At the risk of conjuring up tired old words like bittersweet, it's something of a small miracle that Shelly manages to put a sunny and even silly face on material that might have easily slipped into tragedy.
Nowhere is the whole happy/sad symbiosis more tangled than with Shelly's character, Dawn, a lovelorn single who winds up on a disastrous blind date with a tiny but determined doofus she labels a "mad stalker elf." It's a very funny scene, but with creepy undertones that become a little too poignant in light of the real-life nut-job who wound up murdering Shelly shortly after this scene was shot. (Even weirder, Shelly's character eventually grows fond of her on-screen stalker, announcing "I have found someone to love me to death." And if that doesn't raise an unintentional goosebump or two, wait for Jenna's measured reply: "Let's hope not to death.")
Overall, though, the movie is refreshingly free of ghosts, premonitions or urges to dwell in unpleasant places, and its main dramatic conflict takes the form of a sweetly adulterous romance that blossoms between Jenna and her handsome, eccentric obstetrician. Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion) is everything Jenna's husband isn't — he's nice, he listens to her and, most important of all, he appreciates her pies — so it seems only a matter of time before they wind up together. "Bliss," he gushes over Jenna's "biblically good" creations, while she dreams of a life unencumbered by a slug of a spouse.
As much as Waitress owes to the skewered sensibilities of indie filmmakers like Hartley and Jarmusch, the movie's style also recalls the even more outsized inanities of the classic underground comix of Robert Crumb and company. There's a larger-than-life awkwardness to the characters in Waitress, in the way they mix non sequiturs with homespun slogans that might or might not be ironic, and the movie's connection with reality often seems so loose as to be a matter of convenience, a hook for the audience. Even when passion eventually consumes Jenna and her OB-GYN, it's a cartoon passion delineated by the camera swirling in mock delirium around the couple. And when Jenna finally succumbs to crazy love, the high-beam smile she wears practically plants a word balloon above her head screaming, "Radiant!"
Amiably bizarre and cartoon-ish flourishes abound, beginning with the soft-core food-porn interludes that punctuate the movie, where a glowing Jenna seems to levitate over endless spreads of yummy pies, her voice-over giving them names like Bad Baby Pie, I Hate My Husband Pie and Jenna's First Kiss Pie. And if any doubts remained about Waitress being Mayberry R.F.D. set in outer space, who should show up here but Andy Griffith himself, playing a cantankerous octogenarian, wearing a bowtie as big as his head, and reveling in lines like, "I love living vicariously through the pain and suffering of others."
The oddball whimsy is sometimes a bit forced, and it doesn't always fully mesh with the more "real" reality that periodically rears its head — things get particularly nasty when Earl takes a swing at his wife at one point — but the movie usually rebounds nicely and, most importantly, none of it comes close to being the big screen version of the '70s sitcom Alice that some might have feared. In any event, all problems with Waitress melt away by the time Jenna walks into the sunset, a pleasure eclipsed only by the penultimate image of Shelly looking into the camera and waving bye-bye. That's the shot that provides the real catharsis here and that lingers, maybe just a bit uncomfortably, in our mind's eye.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.