From the Archives: Waitress

Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives uncovers a sleeper hit indie film about a pregnant waitress having an affair that was a very odd mix of comedy and drama, definitely more sour than sweet…

Waitress is a low budget indie film that was an audience favourite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and has since been a sizeable sleeper hit at the US Box Office. Tis a comic tale of a pregnant unhappily married waitress who begins an affair with her charming gynaecologist while dreaming of winning a pie-baking contest…  It’s important to know these facts so that you can disregard them because Waitress is actually a distinctly unsettling clash of comedy and drama. Adrienne Shelley assembled a terrific cast of cult TV stars for her debut film as a writer/director. Keri Russell (Felicity and Mission: Impossible 3), Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm), and Shelley herself play the three waitresses at Joe’s Diner where most of the action takes place. Nathan Fillion (Buffy and Firefly) and Andy Griffith (Matlock) round out the cast of familiar faces from the small screen.

Jenna (Keri Russell) is a waitress who idealises, no make that, romanticises, food out of all proportion. She was taught how to cook by her mother and so each crisis in her life she deals with by her closing her eyes and imaging a new pie she’s going to bake. Much of the film’s comedy comes from these speeded up sequences of her hands piling ingredients into pies with titles like ‘Earl murders me cos I’m having an affair Pie’.  Jenna’s brutish husband Earl is a misogynistic monster whose attitudes aren’t so much 1950s as 1850s, the sneering villain of Victorian melodrama (remember that genre because we’ll come back to it). There are three moments of physical abuse by him in this film that are among the most upsetting things you will see at the cinema this year, all the more so because we have already learned to dread his appearances because of his previous emotional abuse and economic subjugation of his downtrodden wife.

The problem with Waitress is that its enthusiastic reception Stateside has been largely down to the comic side of the film which admittedly features many hilarious turns. Eddie Jemison woos Shelley’s waitress with hilariously bad ‘spontaneous poetry’, Nathan Fillion brings his celebrated comedic deadpan to the role of the nervous gynaecologist Dr Pomatter (who would ordinarily twitch like Woody Allen in the hands of lesser actors) and Andy Griffith joyously resurrects his Matlock persona as Joe, the owner of the diner and an irascible old grouch with a heart of gold. This comedy element sits most awkwardly against the predicament of Jenna’s deeply unhappy marriage and the poverty trap she appears to be stuck in without any hope of escape. The ending then unbelievably resorts to one of the most tired stock cliches of Victorian melodrama in order to solve this script conundrum.

Waitress therefore is hard to recommend enthusiastically, as it is a comedy with many hysterical moments which also features, in Jeremy Sisto’s Earl, one of the most repulsive, because realistic, villains of recent years.

3/5

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes 3-D

Andy Serkis (in motion capture) returns as evolved primate Caesar, but Cloverfield director Matt Reeves cannot rescue this iteration of the franchise from itself.

A chilling prologue shows the lights going out globally as the GenSys-created simian flu decimates humanity. A decade later Caesar (Andy Serkis) is in command of the apes in the Bay Area forest, flanked by scarred warrior Koba (Toby Kebbel), wise orangutan Maurice (Karin Konoval), and loyal Rocket (Terry Notary). There is tension between Caesar and his petulant son Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston), and everything falls apart when Rocket’s son Ash (Doc Shaw) is shot by Carver (The Black Donnellys’ Kirk Acevedo). Carver is part of a team led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke), which includes Malcolm’s wife Ellie (Keri Russell) and son Alexander (Kodi Smith-McPhee). They are trying to restart a dam to provide power to San Francisco’s human colony led by Dreyfus (Gary Oldman). The dam is Caesar’s, and Dreyfus gives Malcolm three days to negotiate a peaceful solution…

Matt Reeves inserts some visual trademarks; a lengthy tracking shot in which chaos explodes into frame, a fixed-position sequence from a tank turret’s POV, and a nicely vertiginous use of the Golden Gate bridge; but whereas Let Me In’s slow-burning approach achieved agonising levels of suspense, this is just agonising – Reeves takes forever to unfurl a very simple and remarkably boring plot. Technically everything’s competent: Michael Giacchino’s music is effective if uncharacteristic (no sad tinkly piano!), and Michael Seresin’s cinematography approaches that of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and would be commendable if it likewise served a mood – but you can’t help feel it’s hiding creaking CGI. Ah, CGI… This is our defining modern paradox; an air of distancing unreality hangs over everything, but the great technology and preparation that created it is extolled as cutting-edge and therefore preferable to engaging verisimilitude achieved practically. The non-ending is as insulting as that of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and a trend that needs to be denounced: it’s like ending The Two Towers halfway through the battle of Helm’s Deep.

Writing takes effort. 2011’s reboot had a shocking poverty of characterisation but was a roaring success. Writing becomes much easier for Jaffa, Silver, and Bomback if they know the audience doesn’t want characterisation… Blue Eyes is petulant. That’s his one note. Then later he’s cowardly. He’s easily duped, because… and sides with Koba, because… then finds his steel, because… the script said so. Koba recalls Firefly’s “Curse your sudden, but inevitable, betrayal!” He discovers Dreyfus’ preparation for war and returns to warn Caesar, but loses his rag because he sees Caesar helping humans; except Caesar’s not actually helping them when Koba arrives… But hey, in event of plot emergency break glass for jerk, right? Carver’s rejoinder to Ellie’s fact – “The virus was created by scientists I don’t think the apes they were testing it on had much say in it” “Don’t give me that hippie-dippy bullshit” – is comically awful, but it’s easier to have jerks spark plot points rather than have Dreyfus and Malcolm’s reasonable disagreement over how to achieve their aim be teased out; perhaps that’s why Oldman is barely in this movie. By the climactic “What are you doing?” “Saving the human race!” gambit we’ve reached a truly low point where self-sacrifice that doesn’t work (like Alona Tal in Supernatural) isn’t tragic, but a running gag from 21 Jump Street.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is so poor it makes you nostalgic for the awful Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Whither Rod Serling’s scripting intelligence?

1/5