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'Waitress' serves sweet, funny slice of life

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published May 11, 2007 at midnight

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Waitress

Looking for a way out of a dead-end life. • Grade: B • Rated: PG-13 • Running time: 107 minutes

When Waitress was introduced at January's Sundance Film Festival, the film's producer encouraged the audience not to regard the premiere as a wake. Most people in the Sundance crowd immediately understood. They knew that Adrienne Shelly, the movie's director and one of its stars, had been murdered in Manhattan several months earlier. She was 40.

It's important to begin this way because Shelly was a talent that should still be among us. She had a nice comic touch, and an ability to walk a middle ground between idiosyncratic and mainstream fare.

Now, a guarantee: I can't promise that you'll love Waitress, but I know you won't be tempted to go into mourning over it, either. Shelly has made a sweet, often funny movie about a waitress (a luminous Keri Russell) whose main outlet for emotional expression involves making pies. Believe me, Russell's Jenna needs an outlet.

Jenna, you see, is married to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a class-A jerk who seems to be in the running for the Most Selfish Man On Earth title. To make matters worse, Jenna's pregnant. She has no desire to become a mother, partly because it would further mire her in a suffocating relationship with Earl, whose self-absorption knows no bounds.

Jenna smiles and goes along with things, but we know what she's thinking. She's not going to feign joy at the prospect of motherhood, another brick in the wall that imprisons her in a Southern town in the middle of nowhere.

Despite all this, Jenna isn't totally unhappy with her job at Joe's Pie Shop. She excels at waiting tables and at creative pie-making, and her fellow waitresses (Shelly and a sharply funny Cheryl Hines) provide support. Of course, a grumpy short-order cook (Lew Temple) presides over the shop, and a curmudgeon of a boss (Andy Griffith) sits at his favorite table, demanding service that only Jenna can provide. She knows how to handle the old man.

Jenna also finds another - and most unexpected - development in her life. She's attracted to her doctor (Nathan Fillion), a new guy in town who finds Jenna irresistible. An affair between a pregnant waitress and her married doctor may not sound like a recipe for happiness, but it brings a little giddy romance into Jenna' s life.

All the movie's women are looking for affection, and Shelly's character finds it in a particularly amusing way. After initial resistance, she's taken with Ogie (Eddie Jemison), a goofball who woos her by reciting the world's worst poetry. It's all part of Shelly's quirky (but not annoying) approach to humor.

Look, Waitress is no groundbreaker, and it's not likely to change anyone's life. But it provides a showcase for Russell, who knows how to make the most of it. If it works for you, Waitress should send you out of the theater smiling, which - come to think of it - makes a nice epitaph for Shelly.