Waitress (2007)

Waitress arrives from 2007, which is to say from an era before the current cultural accounting began in earnest. Adrienne Shelly wrote, directed, and appears in it as Dawn, and the film concerns Jenna Hunterson (Keri Russell), a gifted pie maker in a Southern town who is trapped in a marriage to a controlling and abusive husband and who becomes pregnant against her wishes. The pies carry names like Bad Baby Pie. The tone is whimsical, the palette is warm, and the whole enterprise sits comfortably inside the romantic comedy tradition while quietly declining several of its conventions.

What the film does possess is a genuine, if modest, feminist spine. Shelly builds the story around a woman's interior life, her friendships with two co-workers, and her slow accumulation of cash toward an escape. The affair with the obstetrician is not presented as salvation. The ending, in which Jenna names her daughter, refuses her husband, ends the affair, and opens her own restaurant with an inheritance from the diner's owner, is a story about a woman choosing herself. It is dramatized, not preached. There is no sermon here and no lecture. The film trusts its audience to reach the conclusion on its own.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. The cast is white, the setting is rendered without racial dimension, and no character is marked by sexuality, disability, or environmental concern. The economics of a pie contest and a small diner carry no critique of wealth or capital. This is a personal story told at a personal scale, and it makes no claim to be anything else. It is sweet, it is sad, and it is over. We file it accordingly.