Themes: Expecting a Baby, Small-Town Life, Crumbling Marriages
Main Cast: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Adrienne Shelly, Jeremy Sisto
Release Year: 2007
Country: US
Run Time: 107 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG13
Plot
Trapped in a miserable marriage and blessed with the ability to transform her misery into delicious desserts, a small-town waitress finds her life forever changed by an unplanned pregnancy. Every day, Jenna (Keri Russell) ties on her apron and serves her customers with a smile, and every night she goes to bed knowing that she is one step closer to the day that she can kiss her scarily domineering husband (Jeremy Sisto) goodbye forever. A smart and sassy baker whose extraordinary pies are inspired by her daily trials and tribulations, Jenna fears that her dreams are all but dead when handsome Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion) reveals that she is soon to become a mother. As Jenna begins penning a series of letters to her unborn baby, her life starts to change for the better in ways she never could have imagined. The final film from actress/filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, Waitress debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah just months after the director was discovered dead in her New York City apartment -- the victim of a homicide. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Review
The hero of Waitress works in a diner alongside her harmless but intimidating boss and two friends, one mouthy and the other mousy, making the setup feel like a big-screen version of the TV show Alice (although nothing like that program's cinematic inspiration, Martin Scoresese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore). Director Adrienne Shelley creates a familiar rural American town populated with characters so folksy and charming that the fact Andy Griffith shows up in a small but important supporting role couldn't seem any more appropriate. Shelley darkens this nonthreatening situation right away by allowing our hero, expert pie maker Jenna (Keri Russell), to express her hatred for the baby growing inside her. Although there is no question she is going to have the baby, she wants nothing to do with it after it arrives. Shelley does a fabulous job of allowing the darkest impulses and fears of the characters to color, but never overwhelm them, and she keeps a tone so loving and friendly that the audience never fears for the characters, but simply wishes that they all find some comfort and happiness. Russell is superb as Jenna, playing a variety of emotions from fear to horny to angry to glowing expectant mom, and each phase radiates from Russell's engaging face. Her performance captures the tone, bittersweet without ever lapsing into schmaltz, that the entire film aims for. The supporting cast also walks that same fine emotional line with Eddie Jemison doing a schticky but sweet turn as a man besotted by love, Cheryl Hines playing a character simultaneously selfish and selfless, and Griffith managing to be both prickly and wise. The character of Earl, Jenna's threatening and pitiful husband, showcases everything great about the film. He could easily have become a two-dimensional monster, and while Shelley never flinches from how horrible he is, she allows him to have a humanizing emotional fragility that Jeremy Sisto plays with great skill. Waitress is a warm, crowd-pleasing entertainment that earns its feel-good vibe honestly by never denying the darkness that surrounds, and occasionally engulfs, every character in the film. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
Keri Russell plays Jenna, a waitress living in the American South, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a jealous, controlling, and abusive man named Earl (Jeremy Sisto). She works in Joe's Pie Diner, where her job includes creating inventive pies with unusual titles inspired by her life, such as the "Bad Baby pie" she invents after her unwanted pregnancy is confirmed. Jenna longs to run away from her dismal marriage, and is slowly accumulating money to do so. She pins her hopes for escape on a pie contest in a nearby town, which offers a $25,000 grand prize, but her husband won't let her go. Her only friends are coworkers Becky and Dawn (played by Cheryl Hines and Adrienne Shelly), and Joe (Andy Griffith), the curmudgeonly owner of the diner and several other local businesses, who encourages her to begin a new life elsewhere.
Jenna's life changes after she meets her new physician, Jim Pomatter (played by Nathan Fillion). He has moved to the small town to accommodate his wife, who is completing her residency at the local hospital, and is filling in for the woman who has been Jenna's doctor since childhood. The two are attracted to each other, and over the course of several pre-natal appointments the attraction grows. After Dr. Pomatter invites her into the office under a quickly exposed pretext, she impulsively initiates a passionate (and secret) affair.
Prompted by the gift of a baby journal, Jenna begins to keep a diary, ostensibly for her unborn child, with voiceovers giving the viewer access to her thoughts about that future child and her own plans. Between these entries and the thoughts she reveals as she describes the various pies she creates, the audience gets to know her evolving hopes and dreams, concerns and fears, and slowly growing attachment to the baby she at first didn't want.
After giving birth, Jenna bonds immediately with the baby girl she names Lulu. Earl, clearly disappointed it's a girl and witnessing that bonding, reminds Jenna of a promise he had forced her to make earlier not to love the baby more than she does him. That comment, the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, wipes away any concerns she has about her lack of money and her fear of her dominating husband. (She may also have had concerns that he would direct the abuse towords Lulu.) With determined frankness she tells him bluntly she hasn't loved him in years, will no longer put up with his possessive and abusive ways, and wants a divorce. Later, while Becky and Dawn are helping her prepare to leave the hospital and letting her know that Joe had lapsed into a coma he wasn't expected to survive, Jenna remembers an envelope Joe had brought to her before the birth, when she finds out he had been admitted as a patient in the same hospital. In the envelope she finds a handmade card with a sketch of her, a check for $270,450, and a message of friendship that urges her to start her life anew. While leaving the hospital, Dr. Pomatter wants to have a word with her in private regarding their affair and what is to happen now. She promptly breaks it off, handing him a chocolate Moon Pie and asks her friends to wheel her out. On the way out they ask her what that was all about, to which she coolly replies that she was having an affair with him and just ended it.
An epilogue depicts Jenna winning the pie contest, and becoming the new owner of the diner where she worked, now called Lulu's Pies, serving brightly colored pies to her customers and friends. The final shot shows her walking home hand-in-hand with the now toddler-aged Lulu (played by Shelly's actual daughter, Sophie).
Seeing Waitress at Sundance was a really emotional experience. The typical format for the festival is that the director is introduced to say a few words before the film begins. It was painful from the beginning to see that there was no director to introduce the film, since Adrienne had passed away. So the producer and Adrienne's husband Andy talked about how it had been Adrienne's dream to have a film at Sundance. It was very poignant.
The film was accepted into the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, though its premiere there was bittersweet because writer/director Shelly (who also played Dawn in the film) was murdered less than three months before its debut[3] and just before she was about to learn the film had been accepted into the festival.[2] Its success there led Fox Searchlight Pictures to acquire the distribution rights for $4-5 million.[4] It opened the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.[4]
The film received mostly positive reviews from critics, with an 88% "Fresh" rating among the over-150 reviews tracked by Rotten Tomatoes[5], and ending the year on that site's list of Top 100 films for 2007.[6] It got a 75 out of 100 ("generally favorable reviews") at Metacritic.[7]Waitress was called a "good-hearted, well-made comedy"[8] brimming with "quality star wattage".[9] The reviewer from The A.V. Club was less glowing, concluding:
it would be tempting to compare the setting and ditzy sidekick/tough-talking blonde/soulful lead dynamic unfavorably to Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore if it aspired that high. With its snappy dialogue and broad characters, it's closer in spirit to that film's sitcom spin-off, Alice. Still, there's much to offset the shortcomings, particularly nice performances from Russell and Fillion and a rare, welcome role from Andy Griffith as the diner's gruff owner, even if he's largely there to set up a finale that cheats much of what's come before. It's an imperfect film, but it's the kind of imperfect film of which it would be nice to have seen Shelly make more.
Mick LaSalle called it a "great American film" that transcends its "air of whimsicality and its emphasis on small-town characters and humble locations."[10]
