Am I The Only Viewer in America Who Doesn't Like Waitress?

[Caution, plot (if you can call it that) spoiler ahead (Waitress)]

I think I’ll have a party for all the people who don’t like Waitress, the movie (link). It won’t be a big party; if everyone comes, we can share a phone booth with the Mike-Gravel-for-President Fan Club. But we will need all the support we can get, as this mean-spirited little piece of failed psychotherapy goes whizzing up to the top of the charts.

I really am not sure just why I get my back up so much about this one; there are plenty of other entries in the drinking-men’s-blood genre that I find engaging and funny—hey, I even liked Nine to Five. But this particular cocktail of emotion leaves a sour aftertaste and I am astounded that so few people seem to get it.

The framework is easily enough set forth, if you ever saw the old TV show Alice (link)—earnest country girl with no skills and no resources plucks it out through a world of churlish customers and unfeeling bosses, in the company of her more or less cra-a-a-zy budies. The plucky one here—Jenna— gets pregnant, but it was only the decency standards of the time that preserved Alice from the same fate.

Perhaps what gets my goat here is that the director seems to think she is telling all this with sensitivity. But I’ll bet the farm on this: we have a director who was never any closer to Arkansas than 37,000 feet. What we have here is flyover compassion. The capers, the giggles, the mishaps—they aren’t comedy, they are just mean. The best thing you can say for them is that they serve as a kind of relief from the main theme of the evening, which seems to be the director’s acting out of a series of failed relationships with men.

Oddly enough, one of the most interesting characters in the whole mess—almost the only interesting character—is Jeremy Sisto as Jenna’s husband Earl (link). He’s an ignorant brute, yet he conveys the intuition that he really likes Jenna, however abysmal he may be at showing it. He brings to mind—okay, it’s a stretch—Gilbert Osmund in Portrait of a Lady—who, notwithstanding his sociopathy, really believed that his little bibelot was something grand.

Did I mention that we have a world where everybody lives on pie, and none of the girls weigh over 116 pounds? And that Jenna gives birth to a baby at least three months old? And that it all ends happily thanks to a big check from Andy Griffith? Mrs. Buce, with heroic restraint, says –hey, it is a comic book. And that is fair comment: it is a comic book. The question is whether the director knew it is a comic book. Mrs. B says she did. I think not (but I give her this: the very fact that we can have this discussion means that the movie must be worth something).d

I am, of course, aware that Adrienne Shelly, the director—okay, the auteur—was murdered in her office shortly before the film made it big at Sundance (link). She didn’t deserve that (who does?). But she doesn’t deserve all the accolades, either.