film fatales #217: waitress (adrienne shelly, 2007)
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
This is the thirteenth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 13 is called "Movie Nom-noms Week":
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
- Aphorism IV, Physiologie du goût, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Even though film cannot convey two of food's most fundamental properties, taste and smell, there's still something powerfully appetizing about food in the movies. Food is the great unifier, one of the few things our biology requires, tying us together, no matter our language, gender, nationality, ancestry, or beliefs. And yet, food is a significant differentiator, highly specific to the culture from which we spring and further distilled by our distinctive, personal tastes. That contrast makes cuisine in cinema extra special: it's not just about vital sustenance but also about exploring community, identity, heritage, and artistry, subjects ideally suited to film and made even more memorable when viewed through the unique lens of food.
This week's challenge is to tuck into a title from Ian Casocot's Films in Celebration of Food [and Where to Watch Them]. Whether you pair it with good old popcorn or something more epicurean, you can't go wrong munching along to films with fare as enticing as this. C'est trop bon!
I admit I found the food angle in Waitress a bit unbelievable. It takes place in Joe's Pie Diner, and pie and coffee seems to be just about all they serve. The title character, Jenna (Keri Russell) is the primary pie maker, and by "primary" I mean she appears to be the only pie maker. And she waits tables. And they have lots of varieties of pies, including one she invents every day. I'm not a pie maker, but that seems like too much work for one person to do in a day.
It doesn't matter, of course, because Waitress is a delight. It will forever be known as the last film of Adrienne Shelly, an actress who moved into writing and directing (she does all of those things in Waitress, writing, directing, and co-starring). Shelly was murdered before the film's release. Since Waitress was a true blossoming of a fine multi-skilled talent, it is now remembered for the "What If?" angle.
This is unfair, because the film stands on its own ... it doesn't need our sympathy. Jenna finds herself pregnant at the beginning of the film. She is unhappy in her marriage, and she develops a serious crush on her married doctor (Nathan Fillion), which he returns. The events that follow could be standard, but Shelly, in her writing and in her directing of actors, makes each character believable without forcing them to act in the usual rom-com ways. It's not that there are plot twists, exactly, but the characters do act in unexpected (but realistic) ways.
Waitress snuck up on me. I expected something mildly pleasant, and was glad to find it surpassed my low expectations. And it lingers in the mind, so that I like it more now than I did when I watched it yesterday. Besides Russell, Fillion, and Shelly, the cast includes Cheryl Hines, Jeremy Sisto, and a delightful turn from Andy Griffith as the cranky owner of the pie diner.