Box Office Movie

Keri Russell gives a deft and winning performance as Jenna, a Southern gal who works as a server in Joe’s Pie Diner but who nurtures a poet’s heart. She expresses herself through novel pie recipes, an art she learned from her similarly inclined mother, and one she retreats to in Mitty-esque detail as both an escape from and a commentary on her disappointing life.

It’s part of Shelly’s cleverness that the movie can be synopsized using the names of the pies from Jenna’s culinary daydreams. The “I Hate My Husband Pie” (unsweetened chocolate mainly) describes Jenna’s bitter marriage to the alternately needy and domineering Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and her thwarted desire for escape. A double-course of Jenna’s “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie” and “Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie” address the unwanted complication that may keep her in her bad marriage forever. Then her elderly female gynecologist is replaced by the handsome and amusingly bumbling Dr. Pomater (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion), and “I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong and I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me Pie” is the next item on the menu (“Vanilla custard with banana,” says Jenna in inner monologue. Then desperately: “Hold the banana!”)

Waitress is a real actor’s movie, with each part written with great elan to have its own psychology and even its own dialect. Each player gets to be fully dimensional and has bright and defining moments that crystallize into an affectionate if gently satirical ensemble portrait of a certain kind of working-class Southern-ness. It’s great fun to see Andy Griffith of all people try on a crusty character part; the mind has to reach back almost to the 1950s and his sinister portrayal of a Huey Long-like demagogue in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd to remember Griffith diverging so fully from Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, R.F.D. But every actor, including Shelly herself as Jenna’s geeky waitress pal Dawn, comes off well in this generous bear hug of a film, a sweet movie made bittersweet by Shelly’s murder shortly after editing was completed.

It would be a shame and a crime if that horrific incident were to color people’s responses to Waitress, because there ought to be no place for such a skeleton at this warm and human feast. May the joy inside this movie be Shelly’s lasting testimonial instead.

But boy, oh boy, is there a Crazy twist here: Boy gets paroled and…marries girl!

The second straight Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee from director Dan Klores, Crazy Love documents certifiable couple Burt Pugach and Linda Riss Pugach, whose irregular relationship has been chronicled in the headlines of the front pages of New York newspapers since the 1950s.

It all started in 1957, when Burt—an angular, ambulance-chasing attorney—spotted brown-eyed beauty Linda sitting on a park bench.

His reaction: “I gotta have her.”

Her reaction: “I said, ‘What the hell is all this?’”

An audience’s initial reaction to the stranger-than-fiction fiasco that followed may be similar to Linda’s, but there’s no denying that Burt was a flashy fellow—squiring the 15-years-younger woman around town in a powder blue convertible, instructing the house band at his nightclub to play “Linda” whenever she walked in the door. Fans of that old standard will recall its lovelorn lyrics:

But miracles still happen
and when my lucky star begins to shine,
with one lucky break,
I’ll make Linda mine.

Crazy Love is proof that miracles do, indeed, still happen—in this case, that these charismatic characters’ emotional honesty with not only each other, but also the filmmakers, almost makes sense of their marriage. That, for Burt, taking care of Linda is the only way he can ever really make it up to her, and that, for Linda, letting him do it is “the best revenge.”