Waitress, On Reflection

Adrienne Shelley's Waitress has been on cable quite a bit, and I've had a chance to re-view it.

When it first came out, Althouse hated it. I think I even put off seeing it for weeks on that basis.

I realize now, Althouse and I do not have anything like comparable movie tastes. (For example, I've given a cursory view to Across The Universe, and found it vaguely offensive, despite the music.)

Anyway, I liked the movie when I first saw it, and I like it more on re-view. It's stylized: deliberately placed out of time and a fairy tale situation, in the sense that the characters are all placed in their situations without much concern for how they got there.

What I find weird was Althouse--and others--assertion that this was a man-loathing movie. Yet, in the end, all the characters are flawed, and the only really bad man is Jeremy Sisto's creepily played Earl. Indeed, one of the most despicable characters in movie history.

In fact, the lead character--whose view colors everything in the movie--goes from seeing men as bullies and ogres, and comes to see them as human as her girlfriends.

Now, I'm not unsympathetic to the view that movies--particularly female-centered ones--portray men badly, as villains, etc. But that just doesn't apply here. About the only characters who don't show off severe flaws are Dawn and Ogie, with Dawn being rather insecure and Ogie being...a little intense.

IMDB has this at 7.4 which is maybe a hair low for the current curve (maybe a 7.6). I'm a bit surprised by the number of comments I've read that are so severely judgmental. I sort of come away from this film thinking, "Well, we all make mistakes, and the idea is that we should correct them and move on, and also not be too severe about others mistakes." It's such a non-controversial concept ("Lord's Prayer" anyone?), I'm surprised at how many people approach this from the viewpoint that the main character should be pilloried.

Anyway, Adrienne Shelly was just cute as a bug's ear, to boot. And her tragic death should not go unobserved. Fortunately, it hasn't.