Serves You Right

Adrienne Shelley's stylish Waitress deserves a hell of a tip.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

JUICY: Keri Russell shines as the unsinkable Jenna. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

On Nov. 1 of last year, Adrienne Shelley was murdered. That fact has nothing to do with Waitress, her third feature as writer and director, but it's impossible to blot from your mind. The senseless tragedy of Shelley's death is hardly the ideal scene-setter for a breezy, sun-dappled comedy about small-town adultery, but the movie's radiant goodwill is such that it overpowers even the bitter irony of its creation. Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay Waitress is that for much of its length, you forget what happened to the woman who made it.

With her thick-rimmed glasses and birdlike posture, Shelley was a fixture of Hal Hartley's early films, and she brings the same mixture of daffiness and delicacy to the story of Jenna (Keri Russell), an unhappily married waitress who one day finds herself pregnant by her brutish lug of a husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto). It's an inherently miserable situation, and Waitress doesn't shy away from exploring the depth of Jenna's despair. But instead of weeping or overdosing or whatever else indie-film heroines are doing these days, Jenna expresses herself through art, specifically in the medium of pie. For bad days, there's "I Hate My Husband Pie." For worse, "I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie." (Luckily, the diner where she works specializes in pie, so there's an outlet for her creativity.)

The world of Waitress is unfailingly stylized; Jenna's diner is done up in bright colors that wouldn't have been out of place in Munchkinland. But the movie never chokes on its own archness, the way Hartley's often do. In large part, that's because Shelley's cast is composed of bright-eyed comedians rather than deadpan slackers. When Jenna confabs with her fellow waitresses, the dialogue pops as if they're about to head into a musical number. The movie could easily have turned into deep-fried cornpone, a mock-folksy fairy tale. But again and again, Shelley strikes just the right note, balancing screwball and slow-pitch. Waitress is almost purposefully unambitious (its deliberate lack of pretensions is another thing that separates it from Hartley), but it may be the most flawlessly executed American comedy since the Coens' Intolerable Cruelty.

The frosty concoction only grows sweeter with the addition of Nathan Fillion as Jenna's tongue-tied obstetrician. As the star of Joss Whedon's Firefly, Fillion had his share of comic moments, but he's never had the space to explore the depths of giddy awkwardness he does here. Clearly smitten with Jenna and restrained as much by shyness as medical ethics, he stammers his way through visits with his scowling patient. He's the molasses-slow Yankee to Jenna's sharp-tongued Southerner, a magnificent dope to her world-weary firebrand. It's hard to think of another actor who could wring a belly laugh simply by saying, "I have no response to that."

It's also hard to think of a recent movie of such unambiguous sweetness. Waitress is winsome to just shy of a fault, but it never becomes cloying (although I could do with fewer instances of the word "pie"). Genuine good-heartedness is a rarity on screen as in life. How sad that a heart this good beats no more.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Waitress

Written and directed by Adrienne ShelleyA Fox Searchlight release