What with the trip to New Orleans last week, I hadn't seen a movie in a while, and the Netflix envelopes were gathering dust on top of the TV. So The Wife and I pulled down Waitress and watched it on Saturday night.(And then I wrote that right after seeing the movie and let it sit another week. Life is busy right now)
This is the movie by the female filmmaker (Adrienne Shelly) who was killed soon after it was completed and before it opened -- you probably heard about it. Keri Russell plays a small-town waitress/pie-baker, married to a horrible creep, who discovers she's pregnant and finds herself falling into an affair with her new OB/GYN. It's mostly been called a comedy, but the tone of the movie shifts radically back and forth from scene to scene -- the evil husband, in particular, casts a pall over many of the romantic or comedic scenes, since the audience (OK, maybe just me) keeps expecting him to pop up and do something nasty.
(It is a comedy in the broadest sense, considering the ending. I'll say that much.)
This was Shelly's first film, and, in the normal course of things, we'd focus on the good points (of which there are many) and assume she'd smooth out the clumsy bits in her future movies. Sadly, that's not going to happen. So the fact that Waitress is promising but off-balance looms larger than it otherwise might. It's worth seeing, particularly for Russell's energy and charm, but it's not the movie it could have been.
1 comment:
I thought the film was charming, and it is sad to realize what might have been.
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