Waitress

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale @TheCinemaSource.com

Jenna only likes to do one thing in the world and that is to make pies. It is her only happiness in an unhappy life. At home, she is pregnant with her husband Earl’s child but she does not love him or the unborn baby that they conceived during dispassionate sex. She regrets marrying the male-chauvinist pig who constantly puts her down, controls her life, and expects her to be his supporter rather than his teammate. At work in a pie shop, her boss constantly yells at her to keep working and rarely gives her time to call her husband to get a ride home from work (he will not let her have her own car) or to throw up in the bathroom when she is sick.

Jenna has a painful life, but she still has little hope for two dreams: falling in love and baking in an upcoming pie making competition. Waitress is about Jenna’s quest to achieve both.

The film was directed by the late Adrienne Shelly who was brutally murdered only months after the project was finished. In early November, Shelly’s husband found her body hanging from a shower rod in their bathroom. Originally thought to be suicide, the case changed when a 19-year-old construction worker confessed to killing her because she had complained about the noise he was making in the apartment below earlier that day.

The story is tragic, but it gives important subtext to her moving final film. All great films have one important thing in common: we learn about the person behind the camera in an intimate way. For many filmmakers, it seems, their projects function much like celluloid therapy sessions. Guillermo Del Toro comes to terms with his tortured childhood in the violent, but beautiful Pan’s Labyrinth. Children of Men showcases Alfonso Cuarón’s dissatisfaction with the current political climate of the world. Even recent comedy great Hot Fuzz shows us how much Edgar Wright loves the action film.

In Waitress, Adrienne Shelly has wonderful things to say about the world. In one particularly memorable scene, Jenna asks her boss if he is happy. He stares at her a moment, never stepping outside of his gruff barky personality, and responds back, “I’m happy enough.”

Waitress is a movie that advocates that notion. In a world plagued by so much negative energy, here is a film that begs for something different. It is only fitting that the filmmaker of such a positive project has taken away from us so early.

The characters in Waitress all exist in a world where