Nathan Fillion

WAITRESS straddles two filmic worlds successfully. On one side, it’s offbeat and tart enough to be distinct from studio fodder, and on the other, it’s narratively satisfying enough to be a crowd pleaser. Even if director/screenwriter (and veteran actress) Adrienne Shelly had been absolutely untalented, her murder would still be a tragedy, but WAITRESS indicates that her death is a loss to the indie film world, as well as those who knew her.

The title character of WAITRESS is Jenna (Keri Russell), a woman so miserable in her marriage that she creates desserts with names like “I Hate My Husband” pie. Jenna works at a small-town diner in the deep South, where she’s renowned by customers and staff alike for her creativity as a baker. Only Earl (Jeremy Sisto), her spouse who manages to be both a complete control freak and astonishingly needy, is blind to anything Jenna is apart from what she represents to him as his wife. Jenna is hoping to win enough money in a pie-making contest to escape from her domestic trap, but she’s thwarted not only by Earl but by unexpected pregnancy. Even more unexpectedly, she and her sweetly diffident, new-in-town obstetrician, Dr. Jim Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), fall for each other, even though he’s married, too.

There is an art to being engagingly prickly - conventional “likability” won’t do, but neither will too much sourness. Shelly treads this line beautifully here, letting her characters surprise us with their bluntness and their foibles, but making us empathize with their longings and even their weaknesses - we understand why Jenna can’t quite make it out of the Earl trap and why she’s so readily drawn to Pomatter. The emotional expression through pie-making sounds as though it could be dangerously cute, but Russell - who takes absolute command of the screen here - is so fierce with Jenna’s particular form of self-expression that it’s actually funny.

Russell is in fact so spirited, centered and vulnerable as Jenna that we never question her status as an object of desire even when she’s very pregnant. Fillion has a gift for comic timing and delivery, managing to seem perplexed, resigned and hopeful all at the same time - fans of the more romantic aspects of his FIREFLY character will be especially pleased. Sisto has no self-consciousness about Earl’s semi-menacing, entirely obtuse demeanor, creating a memorably pathetic nemesis, while Andy Griffith has a lot of fun with the resident curmudgeon. Cheryl Hines and filmmaker Shelly provide strong backup as Jenna’s fellow waitresses, who could scarcely be more different from one another.

WAITRESS is made on a budget, but there’s nothing that feels squeezed, repetitive or missing. Instead, it’s what one hopes an independent comedy film will be - lively, humorous and beautifully acted, with a sensibility that is singular yet accessible.