According to the misery she lives in, Jenny, a beautiful woman, who works as a waitress in a dinner restaurant, who has a failure marriage with her husband, searches for happiness, but when she falls for a doctor, her life turns upside down.
The film is hardly flawless - even the pie-baking scenes sometimes seem half-baked - but it's hard not to read promise into every frame, and to wonder what Shelly might have cooked up in the future.
This bittersweet romantic farce teeters and then tips into precious, a forgivable sin once you know this sweet movie's sad history.
Suite101.com
November 22, 2010
Adrienne Shelly's lasting legacy is this exquisite, engaging film about slices of life, Keri Russell's luminosity, an unhurried narrative, Andy Griffith's codger delighting in schadenfreude and even Jeremy Sisto making his abhorrent character relatable.
Waitress is not a perfectly cut, factory-line Safeway-brand slice. It does, though, serve up a generous deep-dish portion, homemade and heartfelt, that leaves a sweet taste goes down.
Shelly deftly achieves a tone pitched between fantasy and reality, its levity belying an astute and humane study of an unhappy relationship steeped in inertia.
