Waitress

Waitress is a film written and directed by the late Adrienne Shelly and is about a woman starting a new life. It's all bathed in the warm glow of a Norman Rockwell painting. As Jenna, Keri Russell plays a depressed waitress at a cozy diner. Her sadness, however, is of the sit-com variety. She's unwilling or unable to do what it takes to convey the depths of despair attendant to a lousy marriage and dead end job. But that failing, coupled with a script no deeper than a thin crust quiche, make this movie about 90 minutes too long. Perhaps if Special Agent Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks) came strolling into her restaurant in search of the perfect cherry pie, it would have been a smidgeon, no - make that a pinch - better.

It starts off nicely enough with a tabletop of freshly baked treats. Fruit is sliced, bread kneaded and doughy strips carefully laid down by supremely proficient pie-making hands. Jenna is the creative, culinary concoctor behind these one-of-a-kind tarts with ingredients that come to her in a pie-in-the-sky sort of way, right off the top of her head. She dreams up these tartlets and names them accordingly, reflecting vices such as lust and betrayal. After all, she's married to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a man insensitive to her needs. He's both a selfish lout and vaguely threatening hulk, with an emotional, rather than physical abusiveness. His blindness to her desires culminates with an immature insistence that she promise to love him more than their impending child. As the dutiful wife, she willingly complies to these demands with a robotic drone familiar to any spouse who's ever been on autopilot.