Film Review: Waitress @ The Screening Room until June 28
Like the pies the central figure bakes in the film, Waitress is sweet—but by the end, the saccharine storyline leaves viewers with a sugar crash.
The film’s central character, Jenna, played by Keri Russell, is a young woman working as a waitress and pie-baker with her two best friends in a diner where her mom worked. She has inherited her mother’s gift for concocting unusual pies.
Jenna’s work life is fulfilling, but her home life, with her emotionally abusive and controlling husband Earl destroys what would otherwise be a happy life in southern U.S.A.
In the opening scene, Jenna gets a positive result on a pregnancy test and she plans to bake an “I can’t have Earl’s baby” pie. From there, the movie follows Jenna through her unwanted pregnancy. Her refusal to accept her new role as mother is at turns funny and painful to watch.
From the very beginning the film seems too sweet to be true—too over-the-top
and too maudlin to create any real suspension of disbelief. The characters are reminiscent of paper dolls—the waitresses in their idyllic blue collared dresses with big, product-frosted hair—but they lack the substance to become more than two-dimensional.
Earl, the abusive husband, is a caricature of a deadbeat hick in a small town. The film has thin glimmers of emotion that show the deeper emotional roots of Earl’s abuse, but those moments are few and far between.
It was good to finally see a Hollywood depiction of what is probably the most common type of relationship abuse. Earl never punches his wife, rarely yells and we don’t see him drunk. Rather, it’s his quiet control, jealousy and insecurity that create the atmosphere of fear that his wife is so desperate to escape.
Keri Russell is endearing in the lead role, but she too falls flat. Her character is too silly to be taken seriously even amidst a life of sobering hardship, from her pie-making daydreams to the false Southern accent, which comes and goes depending on the line.
Andy Griffith has a small role as the “nice guy under a tough exterior” owner of the diner, who plays Jiminy Cricket to Jenna’s lost soul.
It’s one of many immediately obvious side plots, which can be summed up by this conversation: “I’m going in for an operation next week … I might even die.” “You won’t die.” A few scenes later, Griffith’s character is dead.
Besides this unlikely mentorship, gender relations are problematic throughout the film.
In addition to her tumultuous marriage, Jenna has a rather unbelievable and spontaneous affair with her obstetrician, the stereotypical new-to-town Yankee doctor, played by Nathan Fillion. Like a good feminist, Jenna refuses to let him “save” her, but their lack of discussion about the abuse issue is at best insincere and a possible case of medical malpractice at its worst.
One co-worker has an openly hostile and privately hot and heavy fling with the diner’s manager, while the other, desperate to find a man, is at first afraid and irritated by an oppressive bad date with a stalker’s determination, only to marry him later in the film. A healthy romantic relationship is nary to be found, and the solution offered seems to be removing men from the situation all together—the happy ending is a girls-only club.
Despite this seemingly pro-women plot, abortion, an obvious option in the case of an unwanted pregnancy is never really addressed. In the only scene where it is implied as an alternative, Jenna cuts off the doctor with an unqualified, “I’m not so happy about it like everyone else might be, but I’m going to have this baby and that’s that.” This obviously politically-influenced evasion further adds to the implausibility of any real emotional struggle in the movie.
It’s this tendency towards overly simplistic feelings about intricate and thorny problems in her life that inevitably make Jenna an unsympathetic protagonist.
The film’s syrupy approach is clearly intentional—it’s heavily saturated in candy colours, cartoony kissing scenes involving choral music and spinning camera shots, and the setting has a distinctly retro, circa 1950s feel. Ultimately, Waitress misses its chance to make the bubble gum romantic comedy into something more real. The end is too sweet to be palatable and too adorable to believe.
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