Sugar and spice and everything nice

Movie #4, Waitress

I bet most reviews of Waitress use pies as a metaphor. It's almost impossible not to do that, and I'm not going to try: watching Waitress is like eating a slice of Lemon Meringue — it's sweet and light, but it's got a real bite to it.

Keri Russell is just fantastic as Jenna, a weary waitress and baker of incredible pies who desperately wants out of her life. Finding out she's pregnant with her controlling husband's baby makes everything that much worse.

Russell can certainly do "weary," but what's interesting about Jenna is her absolute fury about her life. Russell never loses track of this overwhelming anger, and it colors every aspect of the character. I think it makes the viewer root even harder for Jenna, because she's not simply resigned to the life she's living. There's no quiet suffering here, and that's a pretty refreshing thing for a feminist movie buff to see.

Writer, director, and co-star Adrienne Shelly was murdered in her apartment a few months before the film's premiere at Sundance. I knew that going in, but I wasn't prepared for how devastated I felt when the movie ended. Like Wes Anderson or Tim Burton, Shelly made a film that seems to inhabit a slightly different world than this one, where the colors and flavors are all a little brighter, and the people are all a little off-kilter. She is such a delight as sweet, naive Dawn, but it's the loss of a great female writer and director that hits the hardest.