Sweet as pie

>> Adrienne Shelly’s last film Waitress is a good-natured comedy about a small-town baker

by MARK SLUTSKY

It was hard not to be a little bit in love with actress Adrienne Shelly if you’d seen the films she’d starred in for Hal Hartley in the ’90s, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, at an impressionable age, as I did. Her death last year, at the age of 40, came as a horrible shock; first reported as a suicide, it’s now alleged that she was killed by a construction worker in a dispute over a noise complaint, who then staged her hanging. It was the kind of completely senseless and weird death that seemed fated to end up as a Law and Order episode (and indeed, it already has).

When Shelly died, she had been in the stages of finishing up work on Waitress, not her first film as a director—she began her behind-the-camera career in the ’90s—but it was likely to be her biggest, slated as it was to premiere at Sundance.

Waitress stars Keri Russell (TV’s Felicity) as Jenna, a waitress and pie chef at a small-town diner somewhere in the U.S. As the film opens, she discovers she’s pregnant, which is the cause of some consternation for her, as she feels it’ll bind her even more to her loutish, abusive husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto).

While she contemplates her escape, she falls for the town’s hunky new doctor (Nathan Fillion), serves pie to the town curmudgeon (played by Andy Griffith, of all people!) and commiserates with her waitress buddies (played by Shelly herself and the great Cheryl Hines). Pies are the central motif of the movie, and one of its little storytelling tricks is that Russell dreams up pies to match her problems (like “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie”), which we see being made in tasty detail.

It’s a sweet, friendly, cutesy, girly movie, just unabashedly good-natured and likeable. And look, I’d be lying if I said that my appreciation of the film wasn’t affected by the context here. Maybe I’d be harder on it if circumstances were different, but they’re not. Shelly was obviously a warm-hearted person with real talent as a filmmaker, and watching Waitress, which exudes such unadulterated niceness, just makes her death seem like the saddest thing in the world.

Waitress opens this Friday, May 11

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