Waitress (2007) seduces you—and that is not necessarily a good thing. Jenna (Keri Russell), the waitress at Joe’s Diner, is adorable and has an exceptionally expressive face. One male critic wrote, “I dare you to sit through Waitress and not fall for Russell. Her face is open like a baby’s and sculpted like a goddess [sic].”Another adoring critic, Prairie Miller, says the movie is a “girl homage to . . . Southern women” which “seduces the audience.” But what are Jenna and the movie saying?
I enjoyed watching Waitress, but when it was over, it made me think of the song “Little Black Dress” performed by Cindy Church. She sings about all the options women have in the game of love and concludes, “Why chose anything else when a little black dress will do.” There’s truth in that, but are men really that easy?
Waitress’s witty script also seduces you. When pregnant Jenna has a torrid affair with her married doctor, she creates a pie with her husband Earl in mind. It is called “I Can’t Have No Affair Because I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me Pie,” and the camera shows her dolloping custard into a pie shell, dropping in a penis-shaped banana, and then saying, “Hold the banana.” One of the other waitresses quietly doubts that they could put that pie’s name up on the blackboard in Joe’s diner. This is witty script writing. But what is it saying?
This movie is variously described as a “comedy,” a “romantic comedy,” and a “dramady.” Regardless of the exact label, all comedies say something substantial. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is anti-war. Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2006) says something about mature versus immature love. Yet if you try to identify and critique the underlying theme of a comedy, the effort is often dismissed because “it’s only a comedy.” For example, on the Internet Movie Database, a woman complained that Waitress “sugarcoated” serious issues, and that these issues were neither funny nor romantic. The doctor having an affair with his patient was not romantic but disturbingly unprofessional. Numerous people having affairs was not funny, and we never heard from the spouses being cheated on. You can guess what the very next response was on the blog—the entire response--“Lighten up.”
Waitress presents a world where the women are endearing. What are the men like? Earl (Jeremy Sisto), Jenna’s husband, is both childish and abusive. In the end, he gets what the movie thinks he deserves: When he is celebrating the birth of his first child—albeit a girl—Jenna dismisses him and demands a divorce. The other main male is Dr. Pomatter. Jenna is his patient, and he has a torrid affair with her, a violation of his profession responsibility and code of ethics. He is also cheating on his beautiful, talented, and trusting wife. In the end, he gets what the movie thinks he deserves: Jenna leaves him standing alone in the middle of a hospital corridor holding a plastic wrapped piece of junk food instead of the homemade pies she usually baked him.
The minor male characters include Joe (Andy Griffith) who owns the diner. He is so ornery that all the waitresses except Jenna refuse to deal with him. Although he is curmudgeonly, he has a soft spot for Jenna who, against all odds, will actually serve him in his own diner. He has no one. He leaves Jenna a wonderful gift. The guy who runs the diner, Cal (Lew Temple), orders the waitresses around, caring not one iota for them as people. Then, in spite of a wife the waitresses judge as just fine, he starts screwing one of the waitresses. The third waitress falls for a simple-minded, ah-shucks guy who gets her attention by stalking and harassing her. He invents moronic poetry that seems quite heart-felt and does, in a weird way, express his puppy love for the girl he marries. That’s the men in the movie; that’s the other half of humanity. If you think it accurate, you will commend the film for holding such weakness up to the ridicule it deserves. If you think the portrait inaccurate, you’ll avoid being seduced by Waitress’s charm and repartee, and criticize the film for being sexist.