Waitress

It's hard to imagine that Adrienne Shelly who wrote, directed, and co-starred as lovable Dawn Williams in the film has been gone for 5 years after a brutal murder in New York City. This film was her lasting legacy. When you watch the film, you are seeing genius at work. Granted, there are some flaws in the film but nothing could take away from what it brought. The cast stars Keri Russell as Jenna (a pie making genius) who works as a waitress at Joe's Diner in a small town. She's pregnant and in an unhappy marriage to abusive Earl. Cheryl Hines plays Becky, another waitress who has an invalid husband at home. Adrienne Shelly plays Dawn, the awkward but lovable waitress who finds love unexpectedly. Anyway, Jenna's pregnancy and her job as a waitress makes her realize a lot about herself. She has an interesting relationship with Dr. P. (played by Nathan Fillon) in the cast. It's a great small film. One of those gems that you wished there were more of. I loved seeing Andy Griffith play Joe. He's great.

Greetings again from the darkness. Very personal and intimate story from the very talented Adrienne Shelly. Ms. Shelly was tragically murdered before the film was released, but what a legacy and gift she left for her husband, daughter and film lovers.

Keri Russell ("Felicity") stars as Jenna, a fabulous pie maker who is a lost soul married to the world's worst husband - played brilliantly by Jeremy Sisto. She works at a diner with her two friends played wonderfully by the bubbly Cheryl Hines and the film's writer and director, Adrienne Shelly. The relationship between these three is very realistic, touching and entertaining. They love and cherish each other.

Outstanding support from Eddie Jemison ("Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen"), Nathan Fillian ("Serenity") and the great Andy Griffith, who has some great lines and definitely should work more often!! Jemison's spontaneous poetry capture the heart of Ms. Shelly's character and Fillian's Dr. Pomatter shows Russell what it is like to be adored, rather than abused.

This is not slick Hollywood film-making. It is quirky ... just like real life. These are characters, who for the most part, make the best of their situations. Every now and then, if we are lucky, we capture a moment of pure bliss ... whether it is in the selfless hug from another, or the miracle of childbirth. The script analyzes loneliness and bad relationships with a twist of humor and much insight.

While it is heart-breaking that Ms. Shelly did not live to see the final product, we see her heart and soul on screen. And don't miss her real daughter (Sophie Ostrey) as Ms. Russell's 3 year old LuLu. This is a wonderful little film with some terrific moments and a nice message to enjoy your life.

It is awfully difficult to write about the new pie-filled romantic comedy Waitress without indiscreetly mentioning the tragic death of its writer, director, and co-star Adrienne Shelly. Whenever a wonderfully unique moment occurred in the film, there was a realization that Shelly will sadly never reach her true potential made evident in the film. A major hit at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, one would think Waitress would be a strange, oddly funny gem of a film, due to the festival's independent sensibilities. Yet what starts as that refreshing, different type of a film, turns into another familiar, mainstream romantic comedy.

The film starts with Jenna, perfectly played by Keri Russell, a waitress at a southern diner, who soon discovers that she is pregnant. Jenna's greatest gift is her apparent extraordinary ability to create amazingly delicious pies. Making her own original pies with inventive names seems to help her escape from life with her angry, insecure, narcissistic husband (Jeremy Sisto). Giving Jenna more of a reason to simply run away from her marriage is her new gynecologist, Dr. Potmatter (Nathan Fillion), whom she soon has an affair with. The film is loaded with other memorable roles including her fellow waitresses Becky (Cheryl Hines), and Dawn (Shelly), Dawn's eccentric poetry shouting stalker/boyfriend Ogie (Eddie Jemison), and Old Joe, the diner's owner, and the man whom only Jenna can tolerate, unforgettably brought to life by Andy Griffith.

Waitress is one of the better romantic comedies a wife would drag her husband to, with supremely enjoyable moments, hilarious bits of dialogue, and a first-rate performance by Russell. Her performance is key to the film, as she is basically the only fully developed character. Yet, by the end of the day, the Waitress is still a very light, undoubtedly sentimental, but genuinely pleasant offering by a filmmaker who should have had a great future as an auteur.

Waitress could have turned into a middling mess, or something with characters that are hard to like (or, I should really note, sociopathic) if done in a more hard-lined Hollywood 'rom-com' assembly-line output (in 2007 those were still done). But Adrienne Shelley was more, for lack of a less precise word-choice, sweet-hearted about her characters. Even the villain of the story, and he is a villain who stands firmly in the way of our hero Keri Russell, her character's husband played by Jeremy Sisto, takes a break (if only in the tiniest moments) to not be a scumbag and show how he too can be vulnerable and afraid.

He surely shows his humanity the least - Sisto is scarily adept at making his Earl into a presence that's felt off camera too, if not more so - but Shelley had with Waitress a real chance to make a commercial picture and she took it. Prior to this she directed a couple of low budget independent films, and with this may have seemed to go 'mainstream'. The casting choices though are what count here especially; Russell carries so much screen presence that it's a wonder the lens doesn't make out with her before Nathan Fillion's Doctor does. And in small parts she gets things right too with Cheryl Hines as another waitress at the diner where Jenna serves and (especially, well, uniquely) makes pies, and Andy Griffith is the nice-but-demeaning water (he better get his two waters AND have time to read the horoscope!)

There are times when the movie goes into perhaps being too 'cute' or 'quirky'; this is from the same studio, Fox Searchlight, that would a few months later put out another story of an uncertain-in-her-life young woman, Juno, and there's points this dips into being a story that is so light it might float away (or another way to put it on the other extreme is that it's a more grounded version of Pushing Daisies). And oddly enough if there's one part of the movie that doesn't work for me it's ironically Shelley's own sub-plot, where she's another waitress courted by a stone-cold Nebbish with a capital N, and who have an argument in the diner which kind of grinds the movie to a halt.

But I can forgive (most of) that for how pure the relationship is between Russell and Fillion on screen; I wish I saw more of Nathan FIllion in movies, or at least in leads like this where he gets to develop a character and he shows us just enough to get to understand why he's doing the things he is. Or, on the reverse, not entirely know why, again this is from Jenna's point of view and that's crucial - we're seeing it through HER eyes, through the downtrodden hero we want to see get out of her loveless marriage. Though some parts are funny (scattered really), it's actually more of a drama with a light touch, and it feels harrowing at times in the scope of a low-middle class, blue collar existence: what does one do with the options presented, i.e. bad marriage, a baby on the way that may/may not be loved, and an affair that is hot but untenable?

Russell guides all of these conflicts of the character beautifully, leading up to a conclusion that is genuine and moving. To a further point, knowing about the horrible circumstances outside of the production - Shelley was murdered just before the film was released, though it was finished at the time - makes the very ending a real lump-in-the-throat moment (or just cry your eyes out, go for it). Waitress wears its emotions on its sleeve, but it carries its sincerity along both in the writing and performances, so it's a tough film to ever put down all that much.

Some of my friends ask me why I watch so much trash. Why I spend so much time with stuff that doesn't seem important. Here's one reason why. Sometimes an apparently offhand movie, made for simple consumption will surprise you.

This is being celebrated as a quirky little comedy with serious overtones. According to the expected date formula, it ends happily.

But that's not what I saw. I saw a serious work, by a serious young artist that I would like to see more of. I saw Hartley's influence without knowing the background. If you don't know Hartley, he's a Canadian filmmaker that makes small films. They are called quirky by mainstream movie reviewers. What else are they to say? Its a catchall notion that signifies something that works by using unconventional means but the reviewer cannot say why.

Hartley's films are highly abstract. They are often called stylized, but that usually applies to theatrical conventions. Hartley abstracts in a different dimension of his own. Its abstraction, not simplification. And it usually works because he gets actors that know how to collaborate in it well.

One of these was Adrianne Shelly. A redhead.

She took that level and type of abstraction and did something Hartley couldn't do: she folded her own life into the thing. The story is about her, her marriage and pregnancy. It was written while she was pregnant and at the end features her own daughter as the result of that pregnancy. She writes, directs and acts, but the role she has chosen is not the central one. The narrative stance is as the observer. All the abstraction is done on the observer side.

Its amazingly effective and consistent.

One device that works rather well is how her own approach to the film deviates from the norm. (The norm here is set in the first few minutes as a date movie.) She folds that into how her character deviates from the norm in designing and making pies. The diner is conflated into a theater, with poetry seductions, affairs, a wedding.

Its where we see the small, important and original work of Hartley blossom.

(The filmmaker was murdered before seeing the film in theaters.)

See this. Its good, even the use of Andy Griffith. And the small (one scene) but important role of the other redhead.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.