List Price:   $14.98 Price:   $8.99 find out more information

Buy posters from this movie

Waitress begins by throwing the audience directly into the plight of Jenna (Keri Russell), a beautiful, late-twenties waitress whose tragic sigh of an expression permeates the majority of the film. Jenna is married to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), the sterotypical chauvanist pig of a man who would like nothing more than for her to dote on his every countryboy, blue collar whim. She had planned to leave him, but procrastination got the best of her. We and she find out within the first few minutes of the film that she became pregnant “that time when Earl got her drunk” a few weeks before.
In the company of her two coworkers, waitresses Dawn (writer/director Adrienne Shelly), and Becky (Cheryl Hines), their conversations soon reveal that they are all women stuck with and without. Becky’s husband is an older invalid. Her guilt keeps her with him. Dawn has no boyfriend and no husband but desperately wants one. She’s tired of waiting around and has resorted to five minute dating, whereby she arranges to have only five minute first dates so that neither she, nor her date, will have to suffer longer than five minutes.
Their place of employment is a diner called Joe’s Pie Shop. Joe (Andy Griffith) is a particular, single old man who owns the diner and several other businesses and comes in for lunch on a daily basis. None of the other waitresses will serve him, but Jenna doesn’t seem to mind his ways. He is direct with her in a fatherly but not overbearing way and some of the things he says to her are of the most truly kindest things a woman could ever hope to hear.
Other colorful characters include Carl, the Pie Diner manager, Okie, one of Dawn’s five minute dates, and most importantly, Dr. Pomatter, the gynecologist who replaces Jenna’s regular female gynecologist.
The men in the film for women represent many different faces of men in general…mostly the ones women don’t want. The overbearing, the uncaring, the obsessive, and even the one who seems perfect but is just out of reach.
Shelly’s characters, both men and women, all have depth and personality to them. They all seem to be people she must have known, and who shaped her at some point in her life.
The story of Jenna moves along at a quick pace, dotted with glimpses of her passion for pie making and later, her narrated letters to her unborn child. She’s thought of hundreds of different recipes for pies, each one entering her mind like a little movie…an empty pie shell which fills with ingredients common to the theme of her mood and feelings that day. Her letters to her child give glimpses as to her worries and hopes as time passes by.
This film is, among many other good things, complete. The humor is genuine, the characters are real people, and the story, though predictable toward the end, is fun and has lots of fresh twists along the way. It does what a good film should do…takes you away from your seat and into a different world. It makes you root for the good guys and hope the bad guys get better, or if they don’t, that they get what they deserve. It’s not “like” any other film due to the many, many details that pervade throughout.

Men probably will not take to Waitress as much as women, but it is a definite must see for any woman who hopes, or hoped for more in the man of her dreams.

 del.icio.us    
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15777&reviewer=360
originally posted: 03/18/07 18:29:34
 printer-friendly format