Notes on "The Waitress"

K and I saw this 2006 film last night. When it was in theaters it got good reviews, so we were looking forward to it. It was a romance involving pies. The heroine, a waitress at a diner, invents pie recipes to suit her mood. She is pregnant, but this is complicating her attempts to get out of an abusive marriage.

The villian, the waitress's emotionally insecure and controlling husband (played by Jeremy Sisto), was the most interesting person in the movie. The way he treated his wife was truly frightening. In most other films that center around spousal abuse, the abuse is conveyed with physical violence. Not here. Here it was conveyed in his relentless need to control every aspect of the waitress's life and his habit of announcing his arrival by repeatedly honking his horn.

Like Like Water for Chocolate of several years ago the movie conveyed the leading character's emotional state through recipes. Like Fried Green Tomatoes of a few more years back, the recipes each had picturesque names meant to convey honest Southern rural life. The comradery of the waitresses at the dinner resembled Nine to Five. This movie felt to me like a design by committee, that it was designed to hit a certain set of buttons with its target demographic. The rural life was too picture perfect. The colors too saturated. We were told exactly what we were supposed to feel about each character, no ifs ands or buts.

- J