WAITRESS

Waitress, director, Adrienne Shelly, 2007

 

HOOK: A trio of twangy-accented waitresses surmount small-town misery in a heartwarming tale of female empowerment.

 

STORY: “Mayberry” for our times with Andy Griffith a little older and a little wiser than we remember him, and a radiant Keri Russell who finds true love–not for the male gynecologist with whom she has an affair, but for the baby she is carrying.

 

GOSSIP: Adrienne Shelly (pictured above)–the movie’s writer, director and the actress who portrayed the third member of the waitress trio was tragically murdered by a construction worker months before her picture was released. He punched the 5’2″ actress after she complained about the noise he was making, and then dragged her body back to her office and hung it from the shower rod in an attempt to make it look like a suicide.

 

JOHN: It’s hard to watch this romantic-comedy-drama without thinking the film’s tragic backstory. And the final scene, where Keri Russell and Adrienne Shelly’s real life three-year-old daughter, Sophie, in a Chaplinesque exit turn and wave good-by (to the audience, but we all know they and we are waving farewell to this gifted woman) is one of the most poignant, unintended moments in movie history.

 

GO GO GO (3 GOs out of four)

 

SPANKY: The deck is stacked against guys in this one, but each character (male and female) has their chance to show another side, and the structure of pies at the film’s beginning, pies at its end, and in between (with Jenna’s fancifully named recipes and other characters’ rhapsodic responses to them–“that pie was biblically good.”) was clever, visually interesting and hunger inducing. I don’t know about you, John, but I headed out to the kitchen after the DVD was over and had me a slice of banana cream “slice-o-life with whip cream on it” pie.

 

“TWO PAWS UP” (3 BARKs out of four)

 

KEEPER:  “Baby don’t you cry. Gonna make you a pie. Gonna make you a pie with a heart in the middle.”