MOVIE REVIEW: 'Waitress'


From today's Oregonian....




It's weird to write that a movie chock-full of adultery, stalking, spousal abuse, and hatred of the unborn is the feel-good comedy of the summer. But there it is.

"Waitress" is, in its offbeat way, an absolute delight. And if you know anything about the woman who made it, its delightfulness becomes unbearably poignant. It's the final film of writer-director-actress Adrienne Shelly, best-known for her performances in Hal Hartley's "The Unbelievable Truth" and "Trust." She was murdered in her New York apartment last year, just before "Waitress" was announced to appear at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

The movie puts a punctuation mark on Shelly's senseless death, because "Waitress" is so full of life. It's a comic fable about the painful awakening of a waitress named Jenna (Keri Russell). Jenna is a pie-baking genius, creating "biblically good" recipes that reflect her state of mind.

Of late, those recipes have had titles like "Bad Baby Pie," because Jenna just found out she's been knocked up by her controlling, insincere and deeply stupid husband (Jeremy Sisto). (Russell is darkly funny whenever she gripes about being pregnant; at one point, she considers selling the baby, reasoning aloud that it's "the only real financial asset I have.")

And then -- in one of the odder relationships I've been asked to root for in a movie -- Jenna embarks on a torrid affair with her OB/GYN (Nathan Fillion).

"Waitress" ends up in a fairly moral place, believe it or not, and writer-director Shelly's journey there is wonderfully idiosyncratic. Russell and Fillion give terrific, grounded performances -- but they're giving them in a candy-colored small-town anywhere in which our heroine is flanked by wacky waitresses (Cheryl Hines and Shelly), a poetry-spouting stalker (Eddie Jemison) and an Andy Rooney-ish grouch (Andy Griffith). Shelly's odd little characters and directorial touches add up to a tone you could describe as "fairy-tale small-town despair"; somehow, it never feels self-conscious or forced.

Shelly was clearly paying attention on Hartley's sets: Her movie feels a little like a mainstreamed riff on late-'80s indie cinema, when personal, no-budget films like "Unbelievable Truth" began their brief run as a hip cultural force. "Waitress" is strange and sexy and personal and wonderful -- a weird little slice of pure feeling -- and it's horrible that Shelly never got the chance to see it delight a mass audience.
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B-plus; 107 minutes; rated PG-13 for sexual content, language and thematic elements.

'Waitress' (The Oregonian, May 11, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - May 11, 2007 at 12:18 PM        

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