Waitress
Directed by Adrienne Shelly
Comedies of remarriage, as scholar Stanley Cavell wrote, focus on a coupling dynamic that’s intrinsically amusing: Lovers separate, reunite, squabble, make amends. Because every conflict gets follow-up with resolution, the situations are indelibly cute for their inevitability. It’s an Old-World mentality that Depression-era audiences, whose mainstream cinema culled from the likes of rom-com directors Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, found indelibly appealing. Wittiness always won over familial turmoil, and divorce was a temporary institution. Take away the remarriage, and the genre morphs into something cold and realistic. Escapism leads to realism; sweetness shrivels to melodrama with jokes.
Recent mainstream attempts try to have it both ways, dashing the hopes of reconciliation but not sacrificing the silliness, and it’s rarely a successful formula. The Break-Up seemed self-righteously proud of its downer plot, eventually sacrificing comedic potential for the sake of mundane allegiance to the implications of its title. The late Adrienne Shelly’s desperate wife tale, Waitress, also suffers from a tonal clash, but it does manage a few disparate laughs along the bumpy road to a lackluster postmodern result.
The travails of crestfallen Jenna (Keri Russell, the love interest du jour in Mission Impossible III) are laid out in quick order: A bored server of inventive pies at the local diner, she discovers that her excruciatingly vapid husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), knocked her up one night with the assistance of alcohol. Determined to have the child but hesitant to involve the dimwitted father, she seeks consultation from the hunky new doc in town (Nathan Fillion, strangely one-note), and ultimately winds up in his arms. Clumsily following instructions from her dysfunctional gal pal coworkers (Cheryl Hines and Christy Taylor), Jenna plots her escape to a better life and, naturally, things go awry. The pathos comes hard and fast.
The main swipe of originality that Waitress offers is the depiction of the protagonist’s inner conflict. Assembling scrumptious pies in her head to represent each element of the developing tragedy, Jenna comes across as directionless and fairly dumb. Her magical transformation into a beast of motherhood is the movie’s strongest selling point, and it lasts a matter of minutes. Shelly’s direction never lacks assured implementation of predictable dialog-driven yucks, but the plotting feels incessantly sloppy, as though rewrites never took into consideration a game plan for infusing the characters with liveliness in the face of desperation. As a tool in the master plan during a new age of lackluster romantic comedies, Waitress gets the job done. Its plot twists are neither here nor there, refusing to settle on a preferred mood. Considering the possibilities, it’s a shame that the filmmakers didn’t implicate a single pie-in-the-face gag. Losing the merits of the remarriage, Waitress strains from inadequate service.
