Movie - Waitress (2007)

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/movies/02wait.html

A Slice of Americana, Served With a Sad Smile

Stuck in a marriage to a man she loathes, inconveniently pregnant with his child, oppressed by long hours waiting tables for a grouchy boss, Jenna finds relief baking pies. As lovingly filmed as they are made, these creations serve as both therapy and art. Jenna gives them whimsical names — “I don’t want Earl’s baby pie,” for instance — and combines unlikely ingredients to unfailingly delicious effect.

Adrienne Shelly, who wrote and directed “Waitress” (and who plays one of Jenna’s co-workers), demonstrates a similar confectionary gift. The movie, her third and last feature before she was murdered in November, blends familiar elements into something both satisfying and surprising. Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress (still perhaps best known as Felicity, from the television coming-of-age melodrama of the same name) who plays her.

The small-town Southern diner where Jenna works is a homey, comfortable place, and if you feel as if you’ve been there before, it is probably because you remember the movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” or the long-running sitcom, “Alice,” that followed it. Ms. Russell does not much resemble Ellen Burstyn or Linda Lavin, whose Alices were single mothers rather than young wives, but Ms. Shelly’s mousy, nervous, lovelorn Dawn and Cheryl Hines’s no-nonsense Becky are close kin to Vera and Flo, Alice’s reliable comic sidekicks.

Ms. Hines’s brassy turn — I waited in vain for her to say, “Kiss my grits!” — is a welcome change from her duties as Larry David’s straight man on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” And her zany warmth, along with Ms. Shelly’s mischievous mousiness, fill out the movie’s affectionate, comical view of workplace sisterhood.

Becky and Dawn have their own troubles, but neither would willingly trade places with Jenna, whose husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), is the main source of her misery. A babyish, possessive bully, he is fearsome when angry and annoying the rest of the time. When Jenna reluctantly tells him of her pregnancy, he makes her promise that she won’t ever love the baby more than she loves him, completely oblivious to the fact that she probably has old shoelaces she loves more than him.

Not that impending motherhood fills her with joy. Though she decides immediately to go through with the pregnancy — the word “abortion” is never uttered — the prospect of having a child thwarts her half-formed project of escape. Solace is available in increasingly frenetic pie-making, and also in the company of her obstetrician (Nathan Fillion), a new arrival in town who has an awkward, friendly manner that complements her own mixture of frankness and indecision.

Their smoldering crush quickly ignites into a full-blown affair, though Jenna preserves a measure of decorum by continuing to address him as “Doctor Pomatter.” Their romance is a rare example of movie adultery (he’s married too) without punishment or apology, and it works because both actors are so darn likable.

As is just about everything else on screen, from the pies to the waitresses’ uniforms to the snappy, pop-song rhythms of the editing. Andy Griffith shows up from time to time, playing the crusty, soft-in-the-middle owner of the diner, to lend a further twinkle of homespun Americana to a film that takes place in a carefully imagined semi-mythical realm.

It is not so much that Ms. Shelly has banished realism from her story, but rather that she has tamed and shaped it, finding a perfect, difficult-to-achieve balance of enchantment and plausibility. The story, in which resilience is rewarded, and meanness is banished, is comforting without feeling unduly sentimental, thanks to its mood of easygoing, tolerant honesty. If “Waitress” were more strenuously uplifting, it might be labeled a feel-good movie, but it isn’t that. It’s just a movie that leaves you feeling good.

Except, that is, for a real-world shadow that inevitably falls across its bright surface. Last year Ms. Shelly was killed in a Manhattan apartment she used as an office after the movie had been finished and accepted at Sundance, but before audiences could see it. She was 40, with some fine work as an actress behind her (notably in the Hal Hartley films “Trust” and “The Unbelievable Truth”) and her long flowering as a filmmaker still ahead.

Knowledge of her senseless, untimely death makes the final scenes of “Waitress” especially painful to watch, and the sturdy, modest accomplishment of the film can hardly begin to make up for the loss. But it is something: it is lovely, touching and infused with life.