Adrienne Shelly was a star of the American indie-movie scene: she began as an actor in two movies by director Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth and Trust), and her film Waitress, which she wrote, directed, and in which she took a supporting role, was widely acclaimed as a quirky feel-good comedy-drama.
The above paragraph is in the past tense because Shelly, very sadly, was murdered just before the American release of Waitress. Ironically, or not so ironically, Waitress is about a woman who has an abusive husband, but Shelly was not murdered by her partner. Rather, her assailant, it turned out, was an “illegal alien” with whom Shelly had had a dispute about construction work near her office apartment. Shelly was 40 years old. In the movie world, woman writer-directors are in very short supply.
Unfortunately, knowing about Shelly’s death can only colour one’s view of Waitress, and colour it dark, giving it a tragic edge and perhaps making it feel a bit less uplifting overall. Nonetheless, it is a lovely little film, with a persistently off-beat sense of humour that is also warm and touching — and we should celebrate that.
The titular character, Jenna (Keri Russell), is indeed a waitress — or, as we say in non-sexist South Africa, a waitron, which sounds robotic. (Perhaps there’s a film script in that.) More importantly, Jenna is an extremely talented cook, her speciality being that centrepiece of American patriotism — pies.
Behind the scenes at Joe’s Pie Diner, when not out front waitressing, Jenna is making pie upon pie. This is a real vocation. She thinks up new pie recipes all the time, a creative activity that cathects her emotional issues: when she discovers she’s pregnant by the overly possessive husband she no longer loves, she immediately starts imagining a pie she calls I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie, and soon she’s thinking up another called Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie, the ingredients of which would be “lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in … flambé, of course”.
This is a fun way to comment on the plot, on contemporary American womanhood and on Jenna’s internal processes. The provision of recipes as punctuation for a narrative is a device that, as far as I know, was first used in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, then expanded by John Lanchester in The Debt to Pleasure and, somewhat less palatably, by James Hamilton-Patterson in Cooking with Fernet Branca. At any rate, this notion works a treat — though some of the pies Jenna thinks up inevitably don’t look very tasty.
She’s actively planning to escape her marriage to Earl, a very traditional male who sees Jenna’s role as total submission and service to him. Earl is played by Jeremy Sisto, who was the mentally disturbed photoÂgrapher Billy in Six Feet Under, so he’s got a handle on acting as someone threatening and creepy. That Jenna is pregnant complicates matters, of course, and in more ways than one: she goes to the local medical centre to discover that there’s a new doctor there and sparks begin to fly between Jenna and Dr Pomatter (Nathan Fillion). This is not surprising in that he’s precisely the kind of nice, sensitive guy Jenna’s husband so obviously ain’t.
Much of the humour in Waitress arises from Jenna’s dealings with her fellow waitresses, and at the centre of the film are these three very appealing performances: Russell’s, plus that of Cheryl Hines (Mrs Larry David in TV’s Curb Your Enthusiasm) as Becky and Shelly herself as Dawn. Becky is the most glamorous and sexy of them, with a disabled husband and a secret, while Dawn is distinctly lacking in self-confidence. As a trio, they make a wonderfully comic portrayal of mutual feminine succour.
Like so many indie and low-budget movies, Waitress feels like it’s lacking on the visual front. We’re so used to big eye-popping movie extravaganzas that it can be hard to adjust to something made with just the down-home basics in the way of look and style; it feels like one’s watching television. That said, there’s nothing in Waitress to actively offend the eye, and one is soon enthralled by the storyline and the performances. We get on Jenna’s side, and we stay there throughout.
The Charming Little Indie Movie Pie that is Waitress is definitely somewhat sugary, but it has a lingering lemony tang and a pleasing hint of nuttiness; it’s very edible indeed.