Waitress Review

By Bruce Sanborn

2007
Writer/Director- Adrienne Shelly
Stars-Kerri Russell, Nathan Fillion

SPOILER ALERT

Guys, consider this a warning. Perhaps you read some of the reviews of this film when it was a hit on the festival circuit. Perhaps you are interested in the film since it stars Nathan Fillion (hey, didn’t he star in ‘Serenity’ and the brilliant ‘Firefly’? And wasn’t he the epitome of evil in the last season of ‘Buffy‘?).

This film has been marketed as a comedy, similar to ‘Knocked Up’ with comparable themes and promised laughs.

LIES! This is an outright chick-flick!

The lines have been blurred over the past few years with the rise of the female superhero. ‘Kill Bill’ (really one movie cut in half) starred Uma Thurman and had lots of chicks in it, but was as far from a chick-flick as humanly possible. ‘Million Dollar Baby’ is another. Though it stars Hillary Swank, it’s really an unapologetic guys movie filled with macho brutality and male code of honor.

The aforementioned series ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ is another example. Seemingly a program for pre-teen girls, it’s really about loyalty, lust, betrayal and redemption, good versus evil, the battle of the righteous against the overwhelming power of the darkness. Peckinpah and Kurosawa would have felt right at home here.

More recently, though with less success, there has been ‘Batgirl’, ‘Electra’, ‘Underworld’, ‘Domino’, you get the point.

Other films are tougher to pigeon-hole. ‘Wedding Crashers’ stars manly-men Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and is sold as a comedy but is really a chick-flick in disguise. Loverboy-about-town falls for the good girl, settles down and ten years later wonders how a woman can put on so much weight so fast. I added that last part since the screenwriters failed to do so.

‘Walk the Line’, ostensibly is the story of Johnny Cash, but as it plays out, Cash is a useless drug-addled freak who wouldn’t have lived past his twenties were it not for the plucky, good-hearted girl of his dreams. Chick-flick.

Waitress walks a different line. Only in the advertising is there any effort to hide its true self. Russell plays Jenna, a waitress/pie maker in the vaguely defined South who gets knocked up by her boor of a husband Earl, played by Jeremy Sisto. Earl is an amalgamation of every feminist nightmare: hairy, brutal, crude, dim, controlling, physically abusive, smelly (I’m guessing), horny, rude and illiterate. You would think there would be an upside in that he’s employed somewhere making lots of money doing something, but even this gets perverted, giving him the power of the purse over the little woman. Why she married him is beyond comprehension. There is a line where Jenna laments that he changed after they got married, but this is an excuse, fueling the ‘woe-is-me’ victim-hood seen nightly on Lifetime.

Only in a chick-flick could a woman have drunken sex with her husband, get depressed over being pregnant, have an affair with her happily married ob/gyn and walk away taking no responsibility for any of her actions and women walk out of the theater feeling warm and fuzzy.
On the other side of the street? Guy gets drunk, has sex with his wife who he knocks up. He hates the kid, sleeps with the hot female doctor at the hospital, lies to his despised trailer-trash wife and it all works out when he dumps the wife, kidnaps the kid, boots the hot doc and finagles a boatload of cash from a dying geriatric socialite, remaining a hero.

Picket lines would form.

I don’t mind that ‘Waitress’ is a chick-flick, but the publicity, marketing and press should have proclaimed that fact proudly instead of burying it. Had I known this prior to seeing the film, I might have lowered my expectations, seen it with a female friend and scored points for being sensitive. As it is, I saw it on DVD alone waiting for laughs and instead needed a long hot shower to wash off the treacle.

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