Pie In The Sky?

DVD REVIEW

Waitress, 2007

Readers of this space may have noticed that most of the DVD’s that I have reviewed tend to be from the black and white period of cinema history or, if later, have some overwhelming political significance like the movie Reds. For the record I do watch some current films but that I do not review them is for the most part I do not find them worthy of review in this space. However it is probably a surprise that I am reviewing a 2007 film about a spunky pie-making crazed waitress caught up in a world that is not of her own making and seemingly is a black hole as she attempts to get out.

The plot line of this film is that a young, seemingly wholesome and whimsical working class waitress in a pie café has become unintentionally (on her part, at least) pregnant by her oafish, crude and violent husband out somewhere in small town America. This predicament is exactly the nightmare scenario that this woman does not want. Initially she wants neither the baby nor her husband. What she does really want is to win a big pie bake-off and flee the small burg. The plot meanders around the struggle to reach that goal. Along the way she is romantically involved with her attending physician, begins to get out from under her husband’s thumb (and ultimately of the good doctor's, as well, who just happens to be married) and by a stroke of good fortune (provided by the old pie café owner, played by Andy Griffith) she is able to be independent and raise her now loved child on her own. Well, this is one possible take on the American dream, isn’t it?

But what about the politics? In a funny way the politics are very mixed. Her apparently adamant aversion to the thought of an abortion despite the boorish husband and the crimp it places on her dreams seems counter-intuitive but within the flow of current politics where the emphasis is on keeping abortion legal but rare. Her sex-crazed affair with her doctor while pregnant puts a very different spin on the assumptions about pregnancy and sexuality as previously portrayed on the screen. But in the end our little working class waitress gets her little slice of the American dream, right? She gets her ticket to the middle class dream café and her personal freedom. Nobody says that a commercial film has be politically correct, left or right(and despite all the clamor, most are thankfully not), or be profound but the definitely mixed messages of this film have got this old leftist scratching his head. See the thing and judge for yourselves.